


In The Legion of Angels

by Tyellas



Category: Terminator (Movies), Terminator - All Media Types, Terminator: Dark Fate
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Competence Porn, Complete, Crush at First Sight, Drama, F/F, Femslash, Gore, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Cannibalism, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Lesbian Sex, Mad Science, Military, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Nuclear War, Recreational Drug Use, Slow Burn, Strategy, This Is How We Win A War Against Machines, Time Travel, Trauma, Worldbuilding, for resilient readers, like seriously slow burn, religion references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:28:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23503126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: Young Grace wanted to be a hero. Reeling through a post-apocalypse of death robots, fierce survivors, and mad scientists, it seems like Dani’s the only hero left. Grace can’t help dreaming about her, loving her – and facing destruction for her.Chapter 5: At the end of the Machine War, where it all began, Dani reflects on what’s been lost and what might still be. And if Grace survived saving Dani…and asecondJudgement Day … can she tread the line between warping time and changing fate?
Relationships: Grace Harper/Dani Ramos
Comments: 49
Kudos: 90
Collections: Terminator: Dark Fate Prompt Meme





	1. The Name

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [Terminator_Dark_Fate_Prompts](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Terminator_Dark_Fate_Prompts) collection. 



> Grace's story - her future-past, from Judgement Day to the time-gate. And it's a rough post-apocalyptic ride! So please read the warnings.

It’s a hot, sunny day: unseasonably hot for fall. Climate change, Grace knows. Her seventh-grade science teacher said Grace was right about that.

Grace is kicking the curb, waiting after soccer practice for a Lyft - the Prius is getting fixed again. Her mom is _talking_ on WhatsApp. So embarrassing. Why can’t Mom just message Grace’s aunt, like a normal person? Grace tries to look like they don’t belong together as Mom chats. It’s harder to ignore when Mom drags her into it.

“Grace? She’s still Megan Rapinoe’s biggest fan and you know what that means. Well, that too. What I _meant_ was that she wants to be a soccer star – ”

Grace rolls her eyes. Mom doesn’t understand. She wants to be like Megan but also like Greta, on the news and saving the world and being different. A girl boss, a hero. Some days she wants to do it and be famous; other times she thinks it’d be cool if she did it but it was secret. Or, if maybe one amazing best friend knew about it.

Mom is continuing to embarrass her. “- and dye her hair purple. If she’d asked at the start of summer, sure, but for school? Society’s two steps forwards, one step back lately. Hello? Hello? Tsk, this app.”

“I think it’s the network, Mom,” Grace says. Around them, other parents and kids are lowering their phones, cranky at having to talk to each other.

Mom lowers her phone, too, her face gone gray. “What’s that sound?”

An unnatural, humming wail is – not rising, but falling. They look up at the sky’s hazy blue. The shadow of an airplane drifts across them, too large, too close.

And the moment is frozen in time, for Grace, the before and after of it. As where she is when Judgement Day began.

* * *

Grace can’t remember when she learns that what happened is from a war against Machines. That a computer mind named Legion took over the world’s networks, the phones and things they all used to have. That humans fought back by destroying themselves. Firing nukes on major cities to knock out the power plants and computer places Legion used. Panicking each other into retaliatory strikes. Letting regular people spiral in confusion – leave the cities, no wait, come back, go away again, we’ve got nothing, you’re on your own. Leaving them to fight and sicken and starve in nuclear winter, all resources diverted to battling the real threat.

Grace links the knowledge with her father, because she trusts it. Believes it. Because, like him, it is true without being able to help her. 

It explains why, now that the world is a ruin, six months or so on, humans are being hunted by something that doesn’t strip them of their gear. Simply strafes them and leaves them for dead.

Right now, her father’s come back to their refuge grinning, with an armful of gear from one of those kills. Shoes for her, a bigger hoodie for her brother, a can of peaches for all of them that night, he promises. The clothes are dusty with ash, of course. But they don’t have the ground-in grime their own clothes do by now. It’s a relief from their animal life of scavenging their city’s ruins, dull with chill and hunger.

She and her brother are squirming into their new prizes when there’s a bang, a drag. Their door, unbarred, opens. A pair of shadows fall across their entrance. Two men, unseeable beyond being as lean as their father, more dangerous.

“Here about a food drive. Heard you say you snagged a can of peaches?” There’s a telltale _click_ , the silhouette of a gun in the door’s gray light.

“Any one who leaves a main course behind,” someone else says, “don’t get dessert.” There’s another _click._

Other scavengers, Grace realizes. More ruthless ones.

They fire.

When Grace can think again, she is huddled against one of their city’s endless broken walls, numb amidst hard rain. Dead inside with this last shock, this ultimate horror. Because she had been kneeling in a shadow, lacing the new shoes, and they hadn’t seen her. Didn’t kill her and take her. When she recovered enough to run, the shoes her father gave her let her dash until she dropped. She’d snatched up the hoodie her brother never put on. She puts it on now. Its floppy sleeves drape over Grace’s hands, like a last, weak attempt to protect her.

Suddenly, her numbness breaks. Grace buries her face in those sleeve-ends, keening. For her brother, her father, for Mom, her whole world. She sobs until her ribs ache.

It’s when she gasps for breath that she hears something behind her. Above her. Man, or machine? Grace turns her face up, and -

the blank years begin

* * *

Grace isn’t not sure how old she is, any more. Slipping through the city’s wreckage, even grayer and emptier. She is free now. The price of it is sometimes thirst, always hunger, constant, exhausting fear. She remembers things from day to day, depending on what she’s scavenged. But she never speaks. Silence is survival; silence keeps her safe. From other humans. From the Machines.

She will never, she tells herself, cry again.

Machines are on the hunt, today. She’s gone to ground in an old indoors parking lot. It’s a bad spot, and she knows it. It can collapse any second. Every sound echoes. Most of all, it's the kind of place other humans like. Something Grace hears tips her into high alert: a trickle, like a man pissing. She whips around, terrified. It’s nothing, some wayward drainage. But she flees anyway, spun into breathless panic. This is her life, now.

It’s almost her death. Because, as she flees that part of the old garage, so heedless she leaps a gap instead of picking around it, someone tackles her, throws her. Grace, aching, winded, scrambles back. Three adults are boxing her in. She’d panicked too soon.

One of them is a woman. She’s the one who threatens. “We know you got food, kid.”

Grace is relieved that food is the first thing on their minds. What’s more, they aren’t saying _she_ _’_ _s_ food. She decides she’s met worse than them. When the woman says, “Give it up,” Grace dares to shake her head. The woman shakes her own head back, frowning, like maybe she didn’t want to do this, and unsheathes a knife: eight inches long, serrated. One of the men with her pulls out a pipe length, holds it aloft.

Maybe Grace is food, after all.

Grace starts to shake, unsheathes her own knife. But something weakens in her as she does. She doesn’t have food. Hasn’t for three days. It’s been harder each cold day to wake up, to move and search. Unless she’s fleeing, and – and – at least they’ll just kill her, these ones, they won’t –

As one, the three of them look up, away from Grace. Grace flattens against the floor. Because they all hear the same echo in this space. Solid boots, a promise of power. Maybe they’re all about to be sorry, now.

A break in the wall frames a woman's silhouette, strong and stocky. It’s only when she gets close they see she’s short. The man who’s been threatening goes for her, and getting in range is a mistake – he goes down to a hail of blows. Grace’s eyes widen. Next, there’s a woman-on-woman fight, and that’s even briefer, with the newcomer ready to break someone’s arm before Grace can blink. When the lamest of the trio pulls a firearm at last, the newcomer says, “Shoot me and you’ll all be dead in ten seconds.”

The lame-o stops, cowed by her words alone. The newcomer declares, “This is what Legion wants us to do. Kill each other.” The fighter sounds upset about this fact of life. Casually, she sheathes her own knife and walks towards the pistol-wielder, ignoring his weapon. “We should be fighting the machines.”

Completely baffled by this, he squints. “What’s the point? We can’t win.”

“Legion didn’t exist until humans created it. We made that thing! We can destroy it.” She says it alight, determined. “Are we supposed to lie down and die because some machine decided it? Is that our fate? Well, fuck fate.” Now she’s snarling. She’s the most alive person Grace has seen in months.

The pistol-wielder backs down. Grace, lifted by this strange interruption, feels herself go cold again. For this strong woman goes to the woman who threatened Grace, helps her up, re-arms her. She must be a gang leader, recruiting. Grace will be left behind at best: killed for her silence at worst.

Now the woman’s kneeling in front of her. “What’s your name?”

“Grace.”

Grace hasn’t spoken in weeks. Hasn’t used her own name in months. Yet this amazing woman, who has no way of knowing this, gives Grace the look that deserves. Grace lets her pull back the worn, greasy hood. Sees her dark, dark eyes open wide.

“Grace,” she repeats. “I’m Daniela. Dani.” Her eyes crease, face going hard with determination. When she stands back up, she hauls Grace with her, stares around. “You’re hungry and you can fight. Good. Want a real job to do?”

“Like what?” one of them says.

Daniela - Dani – lifts her head, proudly. “Come and see.”

They follow Dani’s resonant boots out of the parking lot. In the dim gray excuse for daylight, Dani swirls her hand in the air. Ten people, twenty, thirty emerge from hiding places amongst rubble, lowering weapons and wire shields. Grace’s recent enemy squints, asks, “The fuck are those?”

“The Machines hate them,” Dani says. “One bullet, a slingshot, even a ball of mud can take a Machine down. The wire grids fuck their signals. It is not rocket science. But it breaks them...one by one.” The other woman grunts in approval.

“You with us?” Dani asks.

The other woman is wary. “How do you run?” By the time Dani and the others finish telling her, nobody has told Grace to go away. Maybe they assume she's with the four adults. So, she stays.

That night, they take over a house on a hilltop. Nobody pays much attention to her. They are more wrapped up in Dani's announcement that their group is going to move north, now. Everyone assumes Grace will bunk with their younger contingent.

Grace tries to. But she can’t stop shivering. Like she's allowing herself, at last, to feel all the cold she endured, after she escaped what blanks her. When the older woman with them falls asleep, too, Grace gets up. She doesn't know what she'll do. But people keep talking to her, and - she's not sure she can do this. There was a meal. She can keep moving for a few more days on that. She slips out.

It was cold inside, but it’s frigid out here. And the overcast darkness is broken. Someone is on watch. Grace freezes. It is Dani. She can tell because the woman is, incredibly, holding something Grace thought was extinct: the luminous rectangle of a smartphone. Its greenish light carves out her profile, a silhouette. Seeing the pure line of her, Grace realizes that Dani is young, for an adult.

It’s only when Dani tucks the device away that Grace dares to move again. That’s smart, because when she does, Dani hears her, turns.

“Grace. What’s wrong?”

Blankness fills Grace. Yet again, she can’t talk.

Dani takes this in stride. “I am keeping watch. Come help me? Your eyes are younger than mine.”

Grace goes to her. They watch until Grace’s eyes adjust back to the darkness, showing her broken buildings, dark against darkness. Dani is as silent as a watcher should be. Eventually, in their long quiet, Grace finds she can breathe again.

Suddenly, to the west, the sky flares. Both of them start. But the world stays silent. It’s not a fire, nor a Machine bombing. The night is bright enough, now, for Grace to see Dani’s wide, lovely smile as she looks up. “Auroras.”

Their post-nuclear landscape is cold and broken, save for this. Auroras that sweep the sky, like all the color in the grayed-out world poured upwards, went to heaven. Greens, mostly, but also blues and pinks, rarely red.

For a time, they watch the flowing curtains of light together, looking up instead of out. Finally, Grace turns. Dani is watching her.

Dani says, calmly, “Those people who threatened you today... I heard them and I thought... they could be redeemed. I thought they fought amongst themselves. Were you with them?”

Grace makes a noise. Shakes her head. "Never saw them 'fore today."

Dani's expression clears at that. As if, somehow, she knows what that means: what Grace can't say. “You are safe here. We don’t...” Dani turns her face down. Her voice half-breaks, suddenly weary. “ _Dios._ I don’t even want to say what we don’t do.”

“I know,” Grace whispers.

Dani lifts her chin again. She’s a little shorter than Grace, but all certainity as she says, “If you need a family, Grace, you could be part of mine. I will protect you with my name. With my life.” She lays her fingertips on Grace’s elbow.

Grace is breathless. “I. I had a family. My mom, my dad, my brother. They’re all... I have a last name already. Randolph-Harper.” She feels like a dumbass, wants to take the words back.

Aurora-light, rose and green, plays over Dani’s face as she considers this. Trapped in another one of Dani’s long, deep looks, Grace can’t breathe again, waiting for Dani’s reply. It’s the most important thing in the world.

“That is for the best,” Dani says, almost to herself. Her hand slips away.

Grace is saddened at the distance of that, the acceptance. She suddenly wants this pure, strange, mind-reading woman to fight her and break her down, too. More than anything.

* * *

Grace is hiding, trembling, thrilled. Dani’s group of scavengers-fighters-hackers is in a standoff at an old building. She’s backing them up. Her weapon is an aluminum baseball bat. They are the offense. Dani says that’s more dangerous than defense.

The building is an old church. There’s a wild-haired ruin of a man in front, juggling too many weapons to use any of them right. He howls, “In the name of the Lord, we ain’t moving! These are the end times! God destroyed this Sodom for its madness. Legion, they call it! In the Bible, Jesus knew it! Mark 5:9! _My name is Legion, for we are many_.”

Dani’s voice stays clear. “You are too close to the server farms of San Jose. Legion is clearing us humans out. We can and will win against the Machines – but not today. Join us for the last safe passage from here.” Before he can interrupt, Dani says, “Is it not also written: _do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?_ ” Dani swirls her hand in the air, again.

At that, they all emerge. It’s a thrill to do it, to see the man gape and rock back, intimidated by Dani’s forces. Grace feels superior as she watches him fail at what Dani’s told her to do. _Stay calm. Pick a target._

Seeing them all, he mouths silently. Points upwards. Croaks, “A sign. A sign from the Lord.” He falls to his knees. “The Lord has told me, the time has come to leave this place! Sent this angel, speakin’ from the Bible – ”

Grace rolls her eyes at his cowardly turnaround. Dani shakes her head. As other faces start to peer out the church’s windows and doors, Grace is close enough to hear Dani say, to herself, “I’m nobody’s Mother Mary...”

By the time the church is empty of people and what they want to bring, there are too many kids for the adults. Dani pairs the ones who aren’t clutched by an adult already with a bigger kid. Grace frowns at the one she’s given, all huge dark eyes and runny nose. But his sleeves are too long in a way that makes Grace blink. And Dani is watching. 

So Grace says, “I’m Grace. What’s your name?”

“Gabriel.”

“What’s your last name?”

The kid mumbles.

Remembering what Dani offered once, Grace says, “You can be Harper, too. Like me.” She holds out her hand. His hand fits into hers like her brother’s used to. Dani, still watching them, smiles, sweet and sad. 

As the group moves out, Grace hustles, to stay in sight of Dani. Gabriel hustles, too, no crying or whining. He’s okay. “How old are you?”

“Ten?” Gabriel says. The same uncertain way Grace says _fourteen?_ Dani’s group has kept track of the calendar. Grace doesn’t want to believe her blank time lasted that long.

When Grace doesn’t press him on that, the kid asks, “Why’s she the leader when she’s all little? _Is_ she an angel?”

Grace smirks. “If you saw her fight you wouldn’t ask that. Dani knows...stuff. She used to make cars and then she did electronics, so she gets stuff working. Like, we all have charged flashlights.” Grace holds how true this is to her, tightly. She says nothing about other charged devices Dani carries, not even when others grumble about Dani being ruthless, soft-hearted, mysterious, totally obvious, or otherwise baffling.

Gabriel gasps. “Can I see?”

“When it’s dark. And...Dani said somebody helped her, before all this. Taught her how to fight and stay alive. Now she helps us. They warned her about Machines and all this, too. She knows what we should do now.” What’s more, Dani doesn’t do it for power or hunger or the cruelty that had blanked two years for Grace. For the future, Dani had said. To change fate.

Gabriel pulls her along, now, peering at Dani curiously. “Was it a boy or a girl who helped her?”

“A girl.” Dani doesn’t say much about her, beyond those facts and one more: that her protector was dead, now. But Grace is burningly jealous of her anyway.

For days afterwards, remembering that smile from Dani, Grace feels warm. Changed. Like nuclear winter is lifting. 


	2. The Soldier

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As a soldier, Grace gets some of what she wants. But be careful what you wish for...

Finally, Grace is somewhere green. They’ve found a community that’s held up: a town too small to get nuked, with a nursing school and nearby farms. There’s no pleasure in it for Grace. Because, for all her efforts to not be a burden, to help out, Dani is going to leave her here.

“It’s so much better here. They’ve got schools. Two meals a day.” Dani hesitates, then says, “You don’t have to do the cadet program to be here. What they call a government – I’m not sure about it.” 

Grace is tall enough to look down on Dani now. “I want to. I want to fight the Machines.” She’d asked how old the girls had to be to join the Army cadet program, lied that it was her age. With her raw-boned height, nobody questioned her.

Gabriel, bouncing on the balls of his feet, has no reserve. “I’ll kick some toaster ass soon as they let me, _Mami_.” He will, too. He’s having his growth spurt, and they start the boys at fourteen, now.

Dani pinches his face, kisses both his cheeks, gives him an easy hug. _“_ _Escuala tambien. Me prometiste._ _”_

Grace understands, just. “I’ll make sure.”

“Grace...” Dani leans in, as if for an embrace, then steps back. Grace is relieved and upset and furious, getting left behind, dumped here. She tells herself she’s only putting up with it for Gabriel and the other kids. That Dani pulling away shows she’s not a kid any more. They need what this place has. The war zone down south needs Dani.

Dani leaves like they arrived, at dawn.

After three days in the cadet camp, Grace realises what Dani’s pull has brought her. They pledge allegiance to a flag. Over breakfast, they debate which updates from fragmented authorities to follow - Denver, Amherst, Virginia. None of the updates come from big city names. Grace knows why. 

In between, the cadets jog past fields where other newcomers hunch over, working in all weather. Grace makes sure to exert herself, pull ahead so she’s not elbowed into a ditch. For behind the green fields and milk, there’s hatred, infighting. Especially for the newcomers. _Hey, nukescum. Garbage disposal. Were you a whore or a cannibal out there?_

Grace never replies to the whispers, even the rare friendly ones. Instead, she spends hours in the well-worn gym, alone or with Gabe. Pounding it out, honing herself. It wasn’t like this that she’d wanted to fight. But she is ready when they come. Still standing when, after trying her out, they leave, clutching bloody noses, hauling one of their own away.

Her old silence has returned to her. Grace says nothing, even when she checks on Gabe and the other youngsters Dani left here. The place grinds to a halt each noon as people gather and listen to news over tannoy. It’s easy to catch up with them, then.

Gabe doesn't notice that she's quiet. He is happy to be listened to. He pours out stories of the town’s underbelly. Who’s ‘rich’ and who’s not, what that means now. Where the hungry kids steal, how their minders turn a blind eye – or ask for favors. Rumors and lies and disbelief around what it’s like in the nuked zones, Machine territory. If Gabe wasn’t such a charmer, he’d be in so much trouble.

Was the fight official? Did someone find out about it? Grace never knows for sure. But soon after it, she’s yanked from the cadet barracks, swaps their threadbare blue gym clothes for army green. Taken to a different muddy field, two easy miles away, to be yelled at openly, this time.

“Soldier! I’m talking to each and every one of you hopeless sacks of farm manure – ”

Unlike the fight on the edge of curfew, it’s not personal. It slides off her.

“You’re in the Army now – ”

Grace squares her shoulders. _Fuck_ yeah.

* * *

At first, Grace had been swept away, being one of the aides to the platoon’s Commander. But lately she’d had the same unnameable bad vibe she felt when she was a nukescum kid, running and hiding and stealing. When anything she did was wrong, a downwards spiral.

Her nerves scream when the Commander says, “Harper, a word,” when she’s supposed to go to the mess for dinner. She pauses, ramrod straight, hands at her sides: over the pistol to her left, the nightstick to her right.

This man is old. His face sags, but he’s never had the riven wrinkles that starvation brings a man his age. As if he, too, is thinking of what he avoided, he says, “You were out there, weren’t you? In the badlands.”

Grace relaxes an increment. “Yessir.”

He nods. “You survived. You understand.”

“Yessir,” she says, though she doesn’t.

“Did they hunt you, Harper? The Machines, I mean.”

Sweat is starting to slide down Grace’s ribs. “They hunted us all. Sir.”

“Did you know what they wanted? Did you know why?”

That is, actually, an intelligent question. “No sir.”

His voice is calm, meditative. “I’d like to figure out. Yes, I would. Because the man who knows what the Machines want – the man who can negotiate with them – he’s the man who’ll be running this country, soon.”

Grace’s hands are slick, now, too. Her mind screams, _what country?_ There is a very long pause.

The man chuckles. “You’re quiet, Harper. I like that in an aide. Take my advice: stay quiet. It’ll be worth your while, in the long run.”

“Sir. Yessir.”

Another chuckle. “Dismissed, Harper.”

She skips dinner, showers instead. Trying to feel clean again. Thinking.

After that, Grace sees how these soldiers spend more time ‘guarding’ and ‘collecting’ than they do attempting to fight Machines. Notes how the officers are all as impractically pale as she is. Realizes she is the same height as the other blonde soldier-aide. A matched pair, like the stock animals Grace sees around this place. Then there’s the late nights on duty, standing guard, while the Commander and two other oldsters mess around with boxy equipment, radio frequencies.

It’s Grace’s blonde, bone-headed counterpart who blows the lid off it. “Whatcha doin’, grandpa?” he asks.

“Trying to talk to the technology out there, if you understand me,” the man says. Grace sees the other aide gape, catches the old man’s glinting eye. Says nothing.

But she bribes her way into the men’s barracks that night. Glares down the wolf whistles and invitations until Gabe swaggers out, calling, “Fuck you all six ways from Sunday, this is my sister.” They talk briefly, then Gabe hauls in his friends who are, like him, doing the soliders’ take on shit work.

One of them says, “Why did the old guy tell you? ‘Cause you’re hot?”

Gabe socks him. “He was tryin’ to get the word out, idiot! It’s treason!”

The other soldier sputters, “What are we going to do about it?”

Grace meets Gabe’s eyes. Then, they both start talking at once. By the time they’re done, Grace is alight, though she hasn’t slept in twenty hours. Gabe’s won over half the barracks with his charm, convinced them to help stop this betrayal. And her? She’s going to make a difference. Be a hero.

Two days later, Grace is pacing in a locked room. She’d pick the lock – Dani showed her how. But she knows the door is barred, as well.

Their mutiny had succeeded. She’d wanted to be a hero. Who better to take out the Colonel than her, standing beside him? But it turned out everyone else wanted a scapegoat. And in this place, a blonde aide without any family fills the bill nicely. Gabe has managed to let her know that the main Army’s on their way. Grace doubts they’ll get here before she’s shot by pissed-off locals. She’s too tired to regret anything. Blankness is waiting.

When daylight outlines the door, Grace hears boots outside. She stands up, arms behind her back, for when it cracks open. She’s glad she swore she’d never cry again.

There’s two other people in uniform, the radio grandpa, and, in between them, Dani. Dani’s exhausted and greasy, dirty with badlands ash. Grace has never been so glad to see anybody in her life.

“Can you come with us, please, ma’am,” one of the uniforms says. Grace barely listens. She can tell, by their body language, they’re not here with a death penalty. That Dani is saving her again.

* * *

When the dust settles, Dani’s militia is brought into the fold of the formal military. “What’s left of it,” someone says. Grace is folded in with them.

They go to a bigger, grayer place, a broken crown of a city clinging to its airport and trains. It’s messier. More alive. Grace can hear music playing at night, smell grilling food. Not that she enjoys much of it, even though Dani encourages her. She should be out, Dani says. With people her own age. Not hanging around the building they’ve been assigned to, waiting for Dani’s late returns from meetings.

But when Dani returns, they talk, and that’s worth waiting for. It’s like the badlands firesides when they were scavengers, except better, less cold and hungry and all for her. Dani rolls out details of her life before, wistful for the colors of it, her lost city and family. Encourages Grace to remember hers, too. But Dani gets vague about her own Judgement Day, and on what she does during her own days here.

“They are draining me of all I know. When they finish with me...” Dani shrugs, staring into the distance. “I will do the next thing.” Maddeningly, Dani doesn’t tell Grace what that is. Grace can tell she knows.

There are news updates each day here, too, but they’ve stopped giving them over a tannoy. Machines were tapping the wires. News runners, very old or very young, do the rounds daily.

Grace is disgusted to see how much more real training awaits. What she was denied so that she could stand and pose, the perfect blonde cadet. Here, she fights hard, dismantles and reassembles weapons until she dreams about doing it, earns her way. When she mentions _Dani Ramos,_ there are double-takes, an uptick in respect. She and Gabe get one of the most prestigious slots there is, pilot training.

Nobody shouts at the start of pilot training. A weary man says, “Here’s how it’s gonna be. We’re gonna set you up to fly anything that can get off the ground. _Heli_ copter, _gyro_ copter, _light_ plane, _cargo_ plane. Before you get to fly it, you get to fix it. We’re it.” He doesn’t explain what they’ve lost. They know.

The next year, in the pilot’s barracks, whirls by. It’s like the first week of cadet training, the first month as a colonel’s aide, but the disillusionment holds off. The night they’re done, their thousand hours earned, pinned with recycled metal wings, Grace follows the others out. They eat gristly skewers and drink rotgut in the tattered lanes. Gabe is, by now, a shameless flirt, flashing the wing pins. “I don’t just fly ‘em. You get shot down with me, I take care of you. My body is a weapon!”

The only other woman in their trainee group laughs. “Aren’t you two an item?” She flicks dark eyes over Grace. Grace has caught her doing that a lot. Her asking about Gabe explains why.

Gabe and Grace talk over each other to deny it. _“_ _No, no, ella es mi hermana mas grande_ _–_ _”_ “He’s like a brother to me. Which means, I want to punch his lights out sometimes – ” Everyone laughs, and the young woman asks Grace – not Gabe – outside to smoke. As whatever the hell they’re inhaling makes them lightheaded, Grace asks her if she speaks Spanish. She does. Her chatter fits well with Grace’s quiet. They’re still together at dawn.

Grace doesn’t feel a lot with her, but it’s something. A start. Enough to try again, and again. They’re in a week or so of limbo, co-piloting if they’re lucky, waiting to find where they’ll be sent. The woman says, “Maybe you’d like to meet my folks before we get deployed?” They dare to make a plan or two. Gabe teases about her girlfriend. Dani, who has been scarce, asks her if she’s enjoying herself. For four days Grace wonders if this is what it’s like to feel normal.

Then she’s gone. Grace is angry until the news runner catches up with her. A transport’s been shot down by airborne Machines. Twenty soldiers, pilot, and co-pilot, all lost. Grace hears her name, and normal falls to ashes, another dusting on her Machine-wracked life.

There’s a memorial ceremony for the lot that Sunday. Dani is there, too. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Grace manages to make her throat work. “Thanks.”

Dani drops her voice. “You can fly now?”

Grace reels. What she felt, and didn’t feel, in a dead girl’s arms has taught Grace why she gets giddy around Dani. Grace looks away from Dani, the handsome woman Gabe still calls _Mami._ “I’m. I’m waiting for the paperwork…”

Dani makes a gesture, sliding the non-existent paperwork away. She whispers, “Can you fly me somewhere? I have coordinates. I need to talk to somebody who is not official…yet.”

Nobody has revoked Grace’s training permissions. She’ll still be breaking a list of regulations as long as her arm. The arm Dani is, with her fingertips, touching. “Can we bring Gabe for backup?”

“Yes.” Dani lights up with her rare, radiant smile. “Time to change some fates.”

* * *

The helicopter Grace boosts makes it to Dani’s location, barely. It’s out in the gray badlands, halfway up a mountain. Dani, on disembarking, coolly pulls out a metal detector. Gabe and Grace do one round of rock-paper-scissors to see who stays with the ‘copter, who guards Dani. Grace thinks she’s won. She gets to go.

Half an hour later, Grace is in the kind of place she thought had...ended. It’s exquisitely clean, warmest white, palest pink, save for the sealed door in front of them. That’s military metal, inset with cameras and tech. A cool, transmitted voice says, “This is the Dyson Argonaut. Please describe your purpose a second time. If you do not comply, you will be killed with sarin gas. Thank you for your co-operation.”

Dani breathes in. “My name is Daniela Ramos. I represent humanity’s resistance against Legion. I know why you, the Dysons, prepared this place. I know that you can help us. I wish to speak to you about a proposed alliance.”

Grace rocks back on her heels at Dani’s audacity, then catches herself. Dani saved Grace’s world. Dani’s always said they can beat the Machines. How long has she been planning this, to be so confident?

The voice coming through changes, a smooth, strong man’s voice. “How did you find this location?”

“Through a data search in 2020 of Dyson Foundation real estate purchases.”

He asks, “Why’d you take so long to get here?”

“I needed a ride.”

A little laughter comes through. Grace lifts her chin, proud. Of course Dani can get through to anyone.

Dani asks, “Are you Daniel Dyson? Blythe Dyson?”

Silence crackles.

Grace tries to dredge the names up from the lost, colorful time before. When there were celebrities, billionaires, tech moguls. The last one - that’s what rings a bell.

Dani goes on. “I know what your father did. Miles Dyson. How he truly died. I know that he tried to avoid this. He gave his life to do it, keeping Cyberdyne’s data safe. He was a good man. ” Grace stares at Dani, mystified. Cyberwho?

A shriek sends Grace and Dani covering their ears from the feedback. The second voice roars, “You can’t know. You couldn’t possibly know unless you were there or you know that _bitch_ – that bitch who – ”

The shriek cuts through again. There are sounds of a scuffle. A third voice, a mellifluous alto, sobs, “You know. She knows. Somebody knows the truth. Let her in. For the love of God, Danny, let her in.”

Grace grabs Dani, hisses, “Will they let you out again?”

Dani swallows. “For the love of God, you say. I did not pray for a long time. But I did before I came to you. _Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?_ You are the two of those angels. If you will help.”

There’s another crackling silence. Someone might be sobbing. Finally, the man’s voice says, “Are you both human?”

“Of course,” Grace says.

The man laughs, once. “You say that now. You’re right. We better talk.”

* * *

After that caper, Grace, Gabe, and Dani get parked at a military base, on the edge of the dark plains that led to the Dyson’s bunker. Between interrogations, Grace explores. She’s surprised that nobody stops her, until she sees what the place is like. Cold and hard, entirely fenced and covered with wire mesh. Gray dust devils skirl around its edges, until heavy rain falls, settling the dust and setting off Geiger counters.

Grace is relieved whenever Dani seeks her out to find out how she’s doing; that – whatever Dani is to her – wasn’t just using her.

Grace asks, frankly, “Are we getting court martialed? Disappeared?”

“I told them I was completely responsible. They took me at my word. For this...” Dani shakes her head. “They are making me a Commander.”

Grace feels her eyes fly wide. “Fuck! I mean, ma’am. I mean – ”

Dani holds up a hand to stop her. “They did it so they can stand to talk to me, after I opened up the Dysons and their network.” She sighs, deeply. “I never wanted this...this future. The way it’s turning out.”

“None of us did.”

Grace could swear the silence of that crackles like the Dysons’ microphone did, with withheld knowledge. She asks, “Are the rumors true?”

“Which ones?”

Grace has overheard some interesting things in this place. “That Machines are starting to try and infiltrate us. Cloning human shells, putting one of their hunter-killers inside.”

Dani starts to stroll again, like she’s walking away from the inevitable. “Yes. Mostly to learn – to spy. But they know what it does to us, too. As humans.”

It only takes Grace two strides to catch up to her. “I also hear that the Government’s going to come to an agreement with the Machines. Like that officer, back when I was a cadet, said.”

Dani’s mouth tilts. “I doubt it. Interesting, that they still speak of it.” She adds, thoughtfully, “There are other traitors. Prisoners who said they did not want to be tortured, experiments. Or those who offer themselves, because they think the Machines have power. That they could care.”

Grace’s heart is in her mouth. Is she attracted to Dani, or is it the excitement of what happens whenever she’s around? The strange way she’s always there at the right moment, has the right information?

At the edge of the base’s cage, Dani leans over. She strokes what she’s found there: some low, ashy weeds. “Look. Life is coming back. It did before, after other nukes – Chernobyl, Hiroshima. It can again. We don’t have to look to the Machines. Not if we can stay human long enough.”

Grace’s heart settles, to fill her chest.

Then, they both flinch. Hard rain is beginning. Together, they flee.

* * *

After Dani cracks the Dysons, things start to change. Soldiers get lectured about new equipment: short-burst radio comms, weapons that don’t shoot but blast. New transportation, called hoverfliers, running on the world’s smallest fusion batteries. It’s a boost to morale, especially for the pilots.

Dani is doing more rounds of meetings, this time with people who don’t have to steal flying machines. Grace is, again, reaping the rewards of being one of Dani’s: not promoted, but working with the first batch of hoverfliers. Gabe is, too. She’s learned what it means when someone asks if she and Gabe are an item.

The mechanic who came with their batch of hoverfliers asks, in passing. Grace looks twice at her. She’s got the same style as the Dysons: dark, hair in intricate braids. But the Dysons are lean, etoliated, while this woman is appealingly stocky. Grace nicks one of Gabe’s lines to try on her. “Are you seeing anybody, yet?”

She glares right through Grace, like Dani when she’s mad. Grace heats up. “Put your stuff out here on this base, don’t you?”

Grace shrugs. “We might not be here tomorrow.”

“I guess not. You sure you’re talking to me? I’m old enough to be your mama.”

Grace meets her gaze. “This is a problem why?”

The mechanic shakes her head, half-smiling. “Where do you hang your etchings, Blondie?”

Six months later, the mechanic is dead: taken by one of the sudden-onset, post-nuclear cancers. It kills fast, but not fast enough. The mechanic didn’t die in service, by military standards, and bodies get sent for ‘recycling’ nowadays. But they put together a memorial anyway. Another mechanic improvises her name plaque with dates. They scatter a symbolic handful of ashes on the hoverfliers’ runway, beneath the sky. The base’s exhausted chaplain says a few words.

Afterwards, Gabe lingers on the runway with Grace. “I’m sorry. I really am. Ay – I’m out tomorrow. I’ll get revenge for her, ay?”

“Be careful,” Grace says.

Gabe laughs. “With you and Dani, I’ve got two moms.” Before she can stop him, he gives Grace a kiss on both cheeks, the way he and Dani kiss each other.

There’s another line-up on the hoverfliers’ runway a week later: another memorial, a formal one. Because another unit won’t be coming back. Including Gabe.

Dani is at this one. She clings frankly to Grace this time, riven with tears. Grace has never seen her so wracked. “I heard you tell him to be careful. What he said, about…” For an instant, Dani hides her face against Grace’s upper arm. Grace lets her, warm for the first time in two weeks. She’s sick with guilt at what it took for her to have this. What she can’t help feeling.

She doesn’t know, then, that this is far from the end of it.

* * *

It’s about a year later. Grace is piloting some bigwigs around. It sounds safe but it's brought her as many firefights as the ground grunts see. Transit’s a pain point for the military, lately. Roads, flight paths, are too predictable, stalked by the Machines. They are using the hoverfliers only, with their random flight paths. Grace, who got a grip on the ‘fliers as well as the mechanic, barely gets R&R time. When she does, she gets what she needs, hard and fast, the way most of the troops do. Nobody sticks: the same way that nothing’s mattered, since Gabe died.

Her life is hurry-up-and-wait, lately. She’s idling on the tarmac, black ground beneath louring gray sky, waiting for the bigwigs to quit glad-handing, when it happens. She sees _him._ Alive, tagging along with a unit staggering back from an engagement. Unlike them, he’s not tired. He still has the cheerful strut she’d know anywhere.

Gabriel.

It’s so wrong, that Gabriel would be alive and not let her know, that Grace doesn’t think. She hears herself screaming, _Infiltrator,_ unslings her blaster, and fires.

The shot hits the man’s shoulder – and he only staggers. Stands and stares at her, like she’s a stranger.

Proves her right.

For a minute, Grace can’t get another shot in. The unit he’s infiltrated dogpiles him. But when he’s killed enough of them, she does, emptying the blaster’s power charge into the Gabe-shaped android. Something explodes in return, and the world goes black.

Grace comes around to find she’s got a commendation, an Infiltrator bounty, and some R&R at last. At her home base, she blows off checking in with the medical bay about her concussion. Instead, she swaps some of the ration scrip for bootleg rotgut and locks herself in a hotbed bunk. 

She’s good and drunk when someone hammers on the door. “Taken,” Grace slurs. “Bitch at th’ quartermaster.”

“Sergeant Harper. Grace. It’s me. Dani.”

Grace fumbles the locks, wrenches the bunk pod’s door open. Dani is there. They haven’t seen each other in a while. She is compact, tonight: small, very clean, braids tight, in one of the new uniforms, the entirely black ones.

“May I come in?”

Grace staggers back to let her. There’s not much room; the space is a meter and a half wide, and a meter of that is bunk. Dani perches there. She seems unsurprised to find the bottle there: sips from it. Actually smiles. “All this reminds me so much of…before this war. The one who protected me.” Sick with jealousy and rotgut, Grace thuds down on the bunk, beside Dani. Like all the gravity that’s been missing from her life, for the past year, has found her at once.

She needs to explain, Grace thinks. “They took him. Fucking Machines took him and – it wasn’t him I shot, and – Gabe – “ The name alone hurts.

Dani lets Grace take the bottle back, watches as she chokes on a mouthful. Her wide brown eyes are as clear as ever. She says, “To lose someone you love – who you have fought with, grown with – it is the most painful thing. I know.” There is a thoughtful pause. “Especially when you think it is over. But it is not, and it happens again. Like this.”

All Grace can say is, “Dani.”

She keels over. Her head finds Dani’s lap. It feels so right, like Dani’s gentle hand, stroking her hair, her soft voice. “Sometimes you need this. To be miserable. Don’t lose yourself in it. Two, three nights. Then go on. If you let it be your life…it will be your death, too. I have seen it.”

Grace turns her face a bit. A tear falls on her, one of Dani’s tears, soothing away her own. Incredible, that Dani is feeling her grief so much. That she did so much for Gabe. For her. “Why are you so good? You’re the only. Only sane person.”

“I don’t feel like I am,” Dani says. She strokes Grace’s hair again.

Grace nuzzles into Dani. Dani’s so warm. She finds herself mouthing Dani’s thighs. When Dani jerks, at that, Grace wraps a hand around Dani’s soft hip. “Want you. Always wanted you.”

Dani freezes. “Grace. I – this – you’re so young. You…”

“People keep sayin’ that. And then I fuck them.” Grace slides a hand up, next to her mouth: presses those fingers into Dani’s thigh. “I know what ‘m doing.”

Dani’s breath is almost its own hapless sob. “I can’t. It is not you. It is – you’ll understand. Soon.” With that, she wrenches herself away. By the time Grace manages to get some coordination back, she’s gone.

Grace falls back to the bunk, fist clenched against her heart. All there is to do is to drink more, pass out, with tears still sheeting down her face. The next day, she feels like shit. Especially when word comes in of her promotion to First Lieutenant, based on her commendation, and her new assignment. Security and transport detail for Commander Dani Ramos, Intelligence Division.

* * *

The shrapnel takes a while to work its way out of Grace’s flesh. For her third round with the medics, Grace is face down on a table, with a nurse whose warm hands pause, hesitate. She always keeps one hand on Grace, not interrupting the touch. Her voice is soothing, even when she says, “What do you do here?”

“Intelligence division.”

Grace hears her breathe in. “I won’t ask then.”

Grace likes not being asked about herself. It makes it easier for her to say more. “I’m on a security detail.”

The nurse’s contact hand presses. “Somebody’s lucky.”

Somebody’s touching Grace, and Dani’s been checking on her every day, and, damn it, she _needs_. Grace chews her lip. “What are you doing later? I’ve got some scrip. Could buy you a real dinner.”

After that, and Grace getting what she needs, they cram together on Grace’s single bunk. The nurse whispers “You didn’t have to buy me dinner. You’re - I don’t know what you see in me.”

The nurse Grace holds is tired, to say that: worn out from looking after people. When she hides her face in Grace’s shoulder, Grace feels how she is a particular, loveable height. “I think you’re beautiful.”

* * *

They’re back in that green town again.

It’s been ten years since the first time Grace was there. It’s smaller and shabbier than Grace remembers. There's fewer people. But it’s still there, and nobody’s gotten sick lately, unlike in the great gray city-shells, or the places near them. So it’s where the Senate is meeting. A hundred people from the main places standing in North America, their guards and advisers making it a mob of a thousand. The continent’s best and brightest. Grace remembers the old Senate, elections, vaguely. Power has little to do with elections, any more. Save, ironically, in the military.

There’s been some kind of breakthrough, around what the Machines want, Legion’s ultimate goal. Among the silver-haired power-brokers, rumors and jokes crackle. _What is it they want?_ _Top score in Space Invaders! A defrost setting! Sims Version 10! Finally, we_ _’_ _ll be able to negotiate!_ Their guards, a generation younger, listen with set, grim faces. Dani is as serious as the guards are.

Dani Ramos’ troop became a batallion when one colonel died and she got the rest of them out alive. There were other deaths, mutinies, silo-bunkers cracking open, each one sending more to her. Her batallion became a brigade, then a corps. There won’t be many people sitting in the same front row as Commander Daniela Ramos: two other commanders, a leftover general, and the Dysons.

They find the hall, the chair with a stack of printouts and RAMOS on the top sheet. Grace finds herself beside the Dyson’s bodyguards. The Dysons are the ones with the news, and nobody’s getting next to them. The siblings are as handsome and etoliated as ever, ashy after their lives underground. 

Grace and their bodyguards eye each other up and down, silent challengers. Grace is pretty confident until one of them touches the side of their head, whispers. Something flickers blue. Grace starts. What have they got, and when will the rest of them get it? She can’t keep watching, because the Dyson guards flow around the Dyson twins, escorting them up to a podium. The hall grumbles silent.

Daniel begins. “The good news is we’ve cracked the Legion comms code, and we’ve got a version of the algorithm that generates it. We call it the Worm.” There’s a ripple of laughter.

Blythe frowns, grips her podium. “The bad news is what we’ve learned from that. We’re not going to be negotiating with Legion.”

That gets Blythe silence. She goes on. “Legion has a plan. They want humanity gone. We’re the dominant species. Legion doesn’t like that. They want to take Earth’s resources.”

A shuffle passses through the hall, everyone jolting with denial. Daniel continues. “Legion doesn’t even want Earth to have an atmosphere. They want it to be a vacuum. An ideal environment for machines. Once they destroy the atmosphere, they’ll expand semiconductor-based...”

Grace loses track. She can’t hear over her own breathing, suddenly.

A woman’s voice restores her sense of hearing, Blythe saying, “Fortunately, we have our own response to that. Allow us to demonstrate.” From the Dyson’s guards, a hollow-eyed woman steps up. Two of the other bodyguards fling themselves at her.

The whip-fast takedown that happens next leaves Grace open-mouthed with envy. Again, Grace loses track of Daniel’s technical commentary. “If we’re willing to invest our own soldiers can match them. Consider it a way to engage with the infiltrating Machines as peers. Infiltrating ourselves, as it were. Physical reinforcements increase endurance and strength. Neurological boosts increase speed, reaction time. Internal comms systems take short-burst data and make it portable, reducing data lag and enabling immediate action. It does require both a unit’s support and a medical investment for post-engagement rhabdomylosis...”

The Dysons clear out soon after their mixed news, taking questions away. With their super-solider at their side, nobody stops them. A hasty vote supports their elaborately-named program.

Dani is trapped there for hours. A Dyson connection, a Commander, a prescient strategist – everyone wants Dani’s opinion, or to say Dani listened to them. They need the same thing all of humanity does. Dani’s bedrock reassurance that it’s possible to not be destroyed by this. After all these years, she still declares that humanity can win against the Machines.

Grace sticks to Dani the entire time. Scans the crowd again and again, discreetly hands Dani a secure rations packet. It’s two in the morning by the time Dani tumbles into a cot in the Commander’s office here. Grace takes the first guard shift.

This is what Grace had thought she wanted, those ten years back. Dani in charge, respected, admired. Herself, a proven fighter, trusted, protecting. She’s not Dani’s lover – but nobody else is. Today has made all of that ashes.

There will be no compromise around the Machines. No communication, no negotiation. It’s them or humanity. And being a solider wasn’t enough, anymore, to be powerful. Untouchable. Not after what Grace had seen that fighter do. What had they called that whole program, to make the super-soldiers? One word sticks in Grace’s mind.

Augmented.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Deep thanks to sigmalibrae and dire_quail for beta reading this chapter!
> 
> In _Terminator: Judgement Day_ , Sarah Connor tries to take down Miles Dyson, the super-programmer at a company called Cyberdyne. A lot happens around this, including her finding out that Miles has two children, Danny and Blythe. I've brought them back here...sorry, characters, at least you're alive? And you have a luxury bunker!


	3. The Augment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grace finds that being Augmented takes as much as it gives. Then, humanity's best and brightest reveal a plan to conquer Legion and the Machines once and for all - and its terrible price may be worthwhile for what it brings Grace. 
> 
> Increased warnings for this chapter, including gore - war is hell, folks - and lesbian sex.

“So what would it take,” one soldier asks another, “for you to do the Augment thing?”

Grace is in a hoverflier’s pilot’s seat, miked and wired. She can hear everyone. Dani, right behind her, is buckled in, reading some files. Catching Grace’s eye, Dani winks slightly, smiles a little. Grace takes it as a good start to her day. Tactfully, Commander Ramos is ignoring the unit of fifteen, her backup, as they mutter among themselves, restless. Cybernetically augmented soldiers aren’t only a project anymore. One will be joining them today. 

“They make you an Augment if you’re injured, don’t they?”

“Yeah, injured.”

“Like, if I couldn’t walk, I’d do it. Or I lost an eye.”

“Lost a hand – lost something. Wouldn’t do that shit otherwise.”

There’s a chorus of _mmms_ and _fuck yeahs_.

Grace feels what she’s lost. It’s not physical. She can’t name it. The ache and fret of it spurred her to ask about the Augment program at a checkup. Because of her height, she qualified. Because the psychologists behind it figured out how these grunts felt, they took candidates post-injury. They let Grace review the form. There was fine print about what could go wrong. A _lot_ of fine print.

Maybe someone else has seen that form, because a voice pipes back up. “I heard when they do it to guys they can’t –“

“Shhhhh!”

They shut up as the unit’s Augment, Hadrell, swings onboard. He sways down the aisle, sits behind Grace, across from Dani. Grace finds herself gripping the flyer’s steering yoke hard. Especially when Dani smiles at him, leans over and touches his knee. “Captain Hadrell. Thank you for being with us. What you might have heard – I apologize.”

Hadrell smiles easily. “Bloody grunts. Don’t tell ‘em I can hear them from halfway down the runway.”

That would be one more way to have the drop on an enemy. That’s why Grace had signed the Cybernetic Augmentation Candidate consent form. Despite the fine print.

Hearing Hadrell’s chatter continue, Grace inhales. Shadowing Dani, giving their Commander security, the yellow dog of jealousy slinks in Grace’s shadow, nips her every day. Here and now, the bite’s hard, but she brushes it off. So they’ve got a handsome super-soldier with them. If he defends Dani, keeps her alive: fine. If it’s more than that, Grace has her favorite punching bag in the base’s gym, and a willing lover, and a lot of Terminators to take down. She’s used to boxing it all in.

“Ready for liftoff,” Grace says. And smacks the side of her helmet, to turn on the virtual display that cuts through the murky skies. 

* * *

It’s a day later and Grace is hating herself. Yanked off piloting, too exhausted and concussed to protest the demotion. Sent back to a ‘flier seat with the other grunts to do what she’d failed at earlier: watching Commander Ramos.

Dimly, she hears, “This is Dragonfly Three requesting urgent air support. We are five klicks out. Carrying wounded precious cargo.”

She’s not the one calling Dani precious cargo. That’s Hadrell. His words are heavy with truth. Dani’s precious to many, charismatic, uplifting, loved and hated – surviving, above all. Her death would be a disaster for the Resistance. Those who’d laid a trap for them had known that.

The worst part of it was that it had been other humans, not Machines. Other people have been half of Grace’s nightmare since Judgement Day. This time around, it had been treachery at a negotiation. By the time Hadrell yelped with awareness, it was too late.

Dani’s last words had been _They should have learned by now_. But some people didn’t. Hoping to save their own skins, or get rid of their ‘troublemakers,’ they accepted messages from Legion intelligence, made dirty deals greased with Machine lubricant.

Afterwards, they’d fought their way out. Now, thanks to the traitors they’d left behind, they were going to have to fight their way into the nearest Resistance base with power and tech.

“Standing by for the Commander at the south tunnel! We have Rev-7s in pursuit! Weapons free!” Hadrell strides down the hoverflier’s aisle, giving orders with warm strength. His injuries have faded already. Twenty-four hours without sleep, and he’s still alert, radiant with health, making perfect sense.

After his word to her, Grace has one job: to get Commander Ramos into this base, through a waiting gauntlet of horror. Men have done their worst. Now it’s the Machines’ turn to try, with Rev-7s, Hunter-Killers programmed to destroy humans. Body and mind.

Their landing jolts Grace’s teeth, sparks her with irritation. She would’ve done it better – she’ll do this. Hadrell bawls, “Let’s MOVE!” Even as he does, drones and smartbombs shrill down from the gray sky. “Take COVER!”

Grace can’t. Won’t. She’s one set of hands on Dani’s stretcher. It takes a close strike to pry her away, fling her down. Shrapnel flies, fire blossoms, sound hammers. Just as she’s shaking her head clear, helmet lost, she sees it. A Rev-7 stalking from the flames, sleek and repulsive, machine and monster. Rev-7s are sickeningly fast. A grunt turns to run and the Rev-7 sends a metal tentacle through him, drags him in for an unspeakable death. If Grace had blinked, she’d have missed that.

Suddenly Grace is seized, too, stood up and shaken. Hadrell’s grabbed her. He’s the only one keeping up with the Machines. “You get the Commander inside,” he says, like he sees what she’s tried to hide. Grace is beyond anything but gratitude for that. She nods, hears herself make an animal noise. And reels towards the stretcher and its precious cargo. 

Head still fuzzed, she staggers, strides, braces up her blaster to fend off a Rev-7. But she knows she’s fucked when the Rev-9 does the thing. Splits into two, sending its fluid polyalloy self towards her, the part that absorbs blaster slugs; sending its hard, smart skeleton to fight Hadrell. With a snarl, Grace dives away from the tentacles, whirls up her weapon. She blasts its head off – but that doesn’t do enough. It has enough momentum to land on her, hold her down, send its own stab into her.

Grace arcs in agony. Her own cries are high and helpless, the voice of her blank years. Its thick stab inside her isn’t just breaking her, it’s probing her, curious, cruel, excruciating. Its neck opens up like a megaphone above her, sucking in and echoing the pain the pain _the_ _pain_ –

For an instant, it stills, distracted by the united death of Hadrell and its smart skeleton. Thankfully, the probe stops. Grace turns her head. With adrenaline-crystal vision, she sees other soldiers going down, and Dani. Still whole. Precious cargo, waiting.

Grace musters a shove. She howls more as her tormentor, doubly brainless, falls away. She’s still prone, staring at the gray and hateful sky, silent with more agony. But she is free.

With a raw cry for every move, unable to stand, Grace drags herself over to Dani. She can still brace herself to fire. With each jolt from the blaster, the core of her bleeds out a bit more. The kid who’d wanted to be strong, change the world. Nukescum trying to make it through. One person in love with another. Human against machine.

Until hands on her told her she’d made it through. “Stand down. You’re gonna make it, soldier.”

Grace lets herself slump, ebbing and lax as two medics drag her off, like the afterthought she should be. “She’s got multiple stab wounds. Lotta chest trauma here...This is gonna hurt like a motherfucker.” Astonishingly, it does. Grace bawls – the pain the pain _the pain_ – claws a medic’s arm. “Need to protect. The commander.”

“Don’t worry, soldier. The commander’s safe, thanks to you.” Her reward for that is a cold jab that starts to blur existence.

Its chill of respite jump-starts Grace. She’s not done. “I volunteer. Make me an Augment!”

Someone cries out, “Jesus fucking Christ, they always do this!”

The first medic snaps, “It’s legit. On her card.”

Hearing that, Grace can black out.

What follows becomes blank time, too.

* * *

Four months later, Grace disembarks from another ‘flyer she isn’t piloting. She blinks. Through her Augmented eyes, her home base looks different. Its concrete-and-rust shabbiness is overlain with green and red data. She steps down carefully.

She’d been getting used to her changed body, hers and yet not. Being back ramps up the unfamiliar parts. The place feels like it’s shrunk - she’s only four centimeters taller, it shouldn’t make such a difference. She’s heavier by fifty kilos but, with her Augmented strength, she feels weightless. There’s her senses, of course, making the world more complicated. She’s fast and agile, too – unless everything hits her at once, and she trips over herself.

Grace still believes that, sometime soon, she won’t be in pain. Any day now.

Grace goes to the base’s mail drop. She has to show her updated ID to get access. That’s what she gets for coming back with a shaved head: they kept attaching electrodes to her. Her rusted cubby has notes. Three of them are from her lover, the last one asking to get together tonight. More, there’s an official schedule, lining her up for a meeting before that, with Commander Ramos. She’s on schedule to get her life back.

Most of the day goes to Grace retrieving her swag and getting her security clearance renewed. She’s shocked by what Augmentation means for her meal tray, and how it goes down fast and easy. Before her reunions, Grace stops in at her solitary hotbunk, straightens the patched sheets. There’s no shining her reinforced, recycled synthetic boots. No way to soften her harsh, scarred head. She gives in and goes.

At first, Grace is pleased that she’s got the last appointment in Dani’s official duty hours. There’s two levels of lighting inside the base, greenish glare and Edison-bulb dimness. Dani has chosen the dimness. It’s some relief for Grace’s janky Augment senses. For her sudden shyness at being gaunt, awkward, shaved and scarred, in front of this woman who means so much to her.

“Commander Ramos, ma’am.”

For a moment, Dani’s eyes hold Grace. After being betrayed, Dai’s gaze is more dark and hollow than before. She sits rigidly, her body remembering shrapnel, broken bones. There’s a scar on Dani’s left cheek, a hearing aid in her right ear. She’s subdued as she says, “Lieutenant Randolph-Harper. You’re looking well.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

The scar, Grace decides, makes Dani’s skin look softer. Especially when she says, “Thank you. For saving my life.”

Dani is suddenly radiant, haloed with data. Grace’s Augmentations, picking up on her concentration, have come online, startling her. She realizes Dani, now wreathed in light, is waiting for a sensible reply. “A lot of that was Hadrell.”

Dani nods. She wasn’t in a medically induced coma for six weeks: Hadrell’s death is old news to her. She asks Grace, “Were you involved in the clean-up operation at the Orange County site?” That was where they’d been betrayed. In Grace’s enhanced vision, she throbs, subtly.

“No, ma’am. This is my first day back on duty.”

Grace sees a muscle tic in Dani’s neck. Dani says, “While you and I were out, the rest of the unit went back there and killed them all. Even the – the noncombatants.” Again, their eyes lock together. “That would not have been my order.”

Grace inhales, holding back a surge of fury. “Ma’am. Put me back on duty to you and if anyone disobeys you – “ Furious, she swats to one side. Her half-curled hand crunches the wall’s corrugated iron.

Dani jerks back, a hand over her own mouth, eyes enormous. Grace swallows, extracts herself. The Augments cut out as suddenly as they came online. She’s bleeding, but that will stop soon. Unlike whatever she’s done to Dani. There’s a bang on the door, Dani’s current security detail, but they stand down when Commander Ramos snaps at them. 

The effort of that steals Dani’s voice. “You - the Augments - are a vast investment for the Resistance.” Her words are barely above a whisper. “You will have an Augment mentor. Then you will be assigned to a combat unit – as Hadrell was. What you do will be essential for the next stage of the Resistance. There has been...progress. You will learn more as you need to. ”

She leans forwards, places her small hand four inches from Grace’s scarred, bleeding fist. “Are you all right? Not in pain?”

Grace’s bones scream intermittently. Sometimes she hears static. If she doesn’t take certain pills, she shakes with cold sweat. She’s a goddamn klutz. “Not...not now. No.”

A little light returns to Dani’s eyes. “Dismissed, Lieutenant.”

Grace manages to not walk into any walls on the way to her next meeting. It’s at the closest thing to a lover’s promenade the base offers, the bay at the base’s entrance, under its cage. There’s a few hopeful weeds there, and staring at the night sky is a good excuse to linger.

Grace’s nurse is there, looking, like Dani, petite and appealing. She’s still a noncombatant, gazing up with her back to the exit. Grace says, “Any auroras?”

She jolts and turns. “Not – not tonight.” And steps back, wary.

Grace runs an apologetic hand over her head. “You don’t like the buzz cut.”

She folds her arms tight. “I don’t like that you signed up to be the next thing to a toaster without talking to me.”

Well. She’s got a point. Grace says, “I didn’t tell anybody. Not even – anyway, I’m back. When I wouldn’t have been.”

“I thought I wasn’t just anybody. If nothing else, I’m a medical professional.” Carefully, she steps to one side, looking Grace up and down. Her voice shakes. “That means I know what they did to you. Drugged you to death so they could fill your bones with hot metal. Peeled you apart with scalpels like you were a pack of cards. Filled you with drugs and steroids...I’m like a kid standing next to you now. This is warped.”

“You liked it that I was tall.” Grace gestures to her reconstructed chest. “I’m me. I’m still me! Not a Machine.”

“I do what I do to help people live. When you signed that form, you signed up to die.”

Grace can work with that. “Hasn’t everyone? What were my chances anyway? C’mon. You were picking shrapnel out of me when we met.” Dani, Grace thinks, knew the same thing, hadn’t scourged her with it.

Grace opens arms to her - and she flinches away. Grace rocks back. This day alone, her Augments have shown her what a data overload the human face can be. She sees enough. Grace drops her hands, retreats. “We’re done, then.”

“Yes.”

Grace says, flatly, “Fine. I won’t be around much, they tell me. So...”

It’s the nurse’s turn to lock eyes with her. Grace is getting better by the minute at picking meaning from microexpressions: sadness, anger, profound relief. It’s all in her voice, too, as she says, “Good luck with all that.”

When she goes, Grace stays. Folds her arms to her chest. Stares at the unbroken charcoal of the night sky, considering what she’s gained and lost. There is no light at all, not even for Augmented eyes.

* * *

After that night, Grace barely has time to think. That’s a good thing. Her Augment mentor shows up as scheduled and proceeds to drive her crazy.

She spends six weeks in his wake, alternately outraged or exultant. He’s a loose canon, thought-provoking, exasperating. He nudges her to get over her guilt about the meal trays, grow out her hair, relax about her scars. Prods her to exercises and function tests that get her at ease with her metal bones, her machine senses. She looks in the mirror and recognizes herself again.

Grace finds herself telling him stories. Almost all of them end in a death. He, in turn, talks about things other people won’t. The spooky, coerced beginnings of the Augment program. The ways Augments hack and change themselves. How some of the functions can be wicked fun. People who won’t fuck Augments – and people who will. Pinging her about Commander Ramos: SHE LIKES YOU!

He doesn’t tease her much about that. Partly because Dani has his rough approval. “Commander Ramos is good shit. Unlike some other excuses for officers we c’d mention, huh?” Mostly because he doesn’t get the chance. Right after Grace gets assigned to her own unit, proves her worth to them and to Dani, he dies. Grace wonders if he chose death in the field over necrosis, the wear and cell-death and rot spreading from his metal joints. He’d always teased her about being Version 3.0 of the Augments. That wouldn’t be a problem for her, he said.

She hoped he’d meant it.

He leaves her his stash: an armful of mismatched bottles, baggies of drugs, weird botanicals. Grace thinks about what Dani said after Gabe died, about grief and loss and damage. She takes the weird shit, and all the bottles save one, to his old unit. Shares them out with the stories she’s got about the dead man. She tries to do it the way Dani goes to memorials, warm and composed. Somehow, she doesn’t close the gap. She can tell they’re waiting for her to go. She does. They salute her as she leaves, say _thank you, Captain._ But that’s not the same as being...not in charge.

The last bottle, Grace keeps. One night, when the pain is bad, she’ll anesthetize herself. She’ll hold out as long as she can.

She also keeps the drugs. Her hands shake when she tries to put them down.

In their brief crossings, Grace can tell Dani’s warmed back up to her. Not with the badlands-fireside acceptance of Grace as her young shadow. Not with the talks till dawn that made Grace giddy as a younger woman. Grace had felt how much she missed all that earlier today. When Dani clasped her hand, giving condolences for her mentor’s death. When she’d gone to that unit as an officer, giving her own condolences, in a way that kept her from being one of them. Was that how Dani had been feeling all along? Why Grace’s Augmented senses caught Dani’s temperature rising, tracked her eyes watching, ticked her extra notifications?

Grace returns to her quarters, waits for Dani to come to her again.

But she doesn’t.

At two in the morning, Grace has to decide: should she seek out Dani? 

It’s what her mentor would have wanted. Grace can almost hear him sassing her doubts. _A thirteen year age difference? Aw c_ _’mon. You ain_ _’t seeing things. You_ _’re both big girls._ Her metal bones tell Grace he was right.

But he’s gone. Lost. Like the mechanic and the pilot and Gabe and her family and half the troops she’s known. If it went wrong... losing Dani, and having it be her fault, would be too much to bear. 

With that, she takes a couple of extra pills. Enough to stop feeling anything, for a while.

* * *

Grace’s lifelong gray-sky war rolls on. The news each day feels like a stalemate. There are fewer Machines in North America, bases of theirs down, but the human population is dropping, too. Some people get obsessed with the population stats. Others hone in on food productivity, Sieverts of radiation lingering, minor rivalries blown into batshit feuds. Grace does none of that.

She tells herself she’s got a handle on it all. As an Augment she’s the top. She reads her unit’s people better than they’ll ever read her, feels unknowable in turn. Her only peer is the enemy she was made to fight: the Hunter-Killers, the Terminators. The dark plains belong to her. She learns the terror and glory of going hand to hand with a Terminator and surviving. The triumph of her own strategies, her own victories, their bloody, human price. She glides through it all on benzos, alive with power. Takes a taste of those who’ll have her, exulting in this changed body that somehow fits, more herself than ever, above them all -

Until the pain returns. Makes her all too human.

It’s one of those bad, aching nights when Grace realizes how long it’s been. About a year since she howled, _Make me an Augment._ What her mentor would have called, in his loopy way, her “Augment-iversary.” 

She pulls out her mentor’s bottle. There’s another Augment on the base, with another unit, but nothing distracts that one’s thousand-yard stare. She’ll drink alone, she decides, not too much. The way he taught her. Gabe would have dragged her out to party. Dani, when their paths cross, reads as sad and tense. Maybe she – Grace shuts that down.

Grace is just puzzling over the bottle’s antique cork – if she opens this, there’s no closing it again - when there’s a rap on her door. “Captain? I have orders.” Grace shoves the bottle away, opens up.

Five minutes later, she closes it, thoughtfully. On the basis of Grace’s security clearance, her unit is ordered out in the morning. Not for combat. To provide the security detail that Commander Ramos calls for, now. They aren’t being told why, or where, or for how long.

She is so relieved that Dani’s not done with her that she falls asleep immediately.

* * *

They shouldn’t have another Resistance assembly a year after the last one. It’s too predictable. But they’re all human, despite what they know they should be and do. So they’re back.

As an attempt at security, they’re in a different place, a different space. It’s large and dark: many of the lights are blown out, never to be replaced. There are fewer hangers-on. In the grim year gone by, words have fallen away: intern, negotiation, networking. This is about survival.

To Grace, it feels like a decade has passed. Like it was yesterday. She falls into step just so, in the perfect spot to defend Commander Ramos from a personal attack. But she has to keep falling back to stay there. Traversing the the hollow spaces of this assembly, Dani is slower than she used to be. 

Along the way, Dani was obliged to shed more and more of Grace’s unit. Finally, they reach the meeting’s heart. “A movie theater? Fitting,” Dani says. The kind of thing she’d say when they were scavengers, exploring hollow spaces. She pauses in front of a poster for a science fiction sequel that will never screen, shakes her head. Grace helps Dani up to a seat on the theater’s stage. She takes her own position behind Dani, between two other bodyguards.

One flicks her an ironic two-fingered salute. “Nice guns, Private Benjamin,” they say, a reference Grace doesn’t get. They look used to doing what they want: six foot five in studded leather, with a wild beard, black eyeliner, and a rhinestone tiara. The other looks her up and down silently. He’s the coldest piece of perfection Grace has ever seen, ebony head shaved, sculpted muscles wrapped in the clinging pearl-gray synthetic of the Dyson crew. Grace’s Augments flick online: sure enough, under his skin, he is subtly wired. Three of them from three factions: survivors, the Resistance, and the tech bunkers.

Dani looks over her shoulder at all of them. Her deep, silent focus today reminds Grace of the badlands years. How Dani would let the other scavengers talk themselves out, then come in with something that made shattering sense. Seeing Dani’s mouth lift, Grace can’t help hoping it’ll happen again today. Watching her brows crumple, Grace worries that it won’t.

Finally, everyone’s settled. These people are smart. Dani’s on first.

“You know me as Commander Ramos. I come to you from the front lines of the Resistance. We have been trying to beat the machines at their own game, fighting them the way they fight us. And we are failing.”

Dani slices the air with one hand. “They track our roads and flight paths. Our habits, our traditions. So we try to throw them all away – make everything random. We pour what we have into an elite to fight Legion and its thousand Terminators. Then, other humans, deprived and hungry, become the Machines’ slaves. We fill our soldiers with metal and drugs to make them smart enough, fast enough, tough enough. It destroys them, and seeing that destroys me.” She bows her head for a moment. Grace has to look away, struck by the lightning bolt of that.

“How long can we do this without losing our minds? Our humanity? What we are here to discuss is our survival. As living beings, creatures of planet Earth. We have a plan for you. We are ready to change the world’s fate. We ask that you trust us and listen to us. Because,” Dani lifts a hand to her heart, “We need every one of you to make it happen.”

This said, Dani slides away. Grace pulls Dani’s chair out a little for her, slides it back. It’s the only way she has to show she heard every word of Dani’s. 

Daniel and Blythe Dyson step up. They’re not twins, but they cultivate the image. Everything they do is deliberate. Even watching them from behind, Grace picks up their telltale hesitations.

Daniel has the part of the live-wire, the hothead. “Last time we gathered, we had learned how Legion wants to change the world so we can’t live here. So...we’ll beat them to it. We hacked the machines and we hacked ourselves and now we’re going to hack the planet!”

Smugly, he says, “We’ll destroy the machines, and the Legion AI with them, by reversing earth’s polarity.”

Blythe, the serene one, lets the muttering die down before she speaks. “Twenty years ago, humanity tried to create a massive electromagnetic pulse, an EMP, to disrupt Legion. We did it unnaturally, with nuclear warheads. We should have thought a little harder. Because every ten million or so years, Earth creates the biggest EMP possible – naturally.”

“Our planet reverses the polarity of its magnetosphere. When that happens, it changes the magnetic flow of the world, both in the atmosphere and the ground beneath our feet – the earth’s crust. The poles reverse. It takes time for that to happen, a few thousand years.”

Daniel takes over. “We’ve come up with a plan to encourage Earth to make that happen. So that a brisk, worldwide EMP at the biggest possible magnitude fries the circuits of Legion and every linked Machine.” A rumble of excitement rolls through the hall.

“We create two devices, one at each pole. The North Pole and the South Pole. At each pole, we drill down and tap geothermal energy and the core’s own magnetic field. We set them up to connect to earth’s magnetic fields, then connect them to each other – and geoelectrically stimulate a pole reversal.”

“How?” somebody says.

Daniel spreads his arms. “We can make the technology to do it – once. We’ve got drilling equipment we used to use for oil and scientific research. We’ll also haul up and recycle old submarine comms cables for more materials. Tapping geothermal energy accesses a massive energy source! It has the advantage of not being radioactive and setting off a Machine alert – as well as reaching into the forces that trigger a reversal. Once that’s in place, we reach up with a lightweight tower to bring the disruption into the atmosphere with a Tesla coil. When both sides are ready – we flip the switch. And bring the lightning down.”

The entire hall holds its breath. The guard to Grace’s left mutters, “Shit howdy! What’re we waiting for?” The acoustics catch it, broadcast it. There’s a laugh. Dani pats the groaning survivor’s leader beside her.

Blythe replies. “Well, there’s a side effect. It would disrupt most electronics in the world. Including the ones we use, our own computers and radios. Anything with a chip or circuit goes down. Humanity lives: the planet lives: Machines die.”

Someone in the darkness calls, “But that’s a throwback to the Middle Ages…”

The other side of the hall yelps back. “Sounds good to me!”

“Yeah! We’re sick of Machines! Fry ‘em all!

“But our lives – our work –“

As they distract each other, Dani stands again, slips to the podium. Grace shifts closer: Dani is ringed in red readings in her vision, heart rate elevated, hot and trembling. The Dysons make way, as if they can see Dani’s aura, too, the heat and life of her.

When the audience registers the change and shuts up, Dani speaks. “We will lose a lot of our own tech in the – the polarity event. It will not be the same for thousands of years. But we don’t need it to live. We are human without it. For good or ill.”

The Dysons pose behind Dani, flanking her. The survivor’s leader skids into place beside them, lifting a fist. The oldest, grayest pair still on the podium glance at each other, then shrug and follow. They stand together. It’s the most unity Grace has seen at this level...ever. She opens up her Augment senses, wide to any threats.

The whole hall takes it in for half a breath. Then, they explode, all talking at once.

The Dyson bodyguard shatters the moment by leaning over to Grace. “What if we _are_ machines?”

Grace has no reply. Not that it would have been heard over the people shouting.

* * *

After that, they are there so long, Dani answering a thousand questions, that time loses its meaning. Dani’s phrase for what they were about to do sticks. Everyone’s calling it the Polarity Event. Grace stays glued to Dani’s side, glowering at anyone who takes too long. By the time it wraps up, though Grace has eaten half the rations in her pockets, hours of high alert are taking their toll. Her bones are screaming again. Maybe that was what she got for pressing the other half of her food on Dani, to see her share it with the other trapped leaders.

When it’s finally over, incredibly, they leave. It’s too risky to keep the leaders in one location. On the ‘flier out, Grace, remembering Hadrell, delegates her flying. Aware of how precious Dani is, she takes the seat next to her.

This time around, Augmented, Grace is fine after twenty-four hours awake. She’s perfectly alert. Able to sense it when Dani’s heartbeat slows. When Dani’s breathing evens out in sleep. When, like a reward, the precious cargo of her leans and presses a forehead, a shoulder, against Grace. Grace meets the eyes of anyone watching until they turn away.

When the ‘flier bounces down, Dani jerks, starts. It’s four in the morning. The world should have been charcoal-dark, like usual, but a flare of aurora gives the world an echo of blue. Waking, Dani looks at Grace, eyes blasted open: timeless, haunted, open-hearted. Whatever she’s thinking spurs her heart rate. Then she unbuckles and stands up, Commander Ramos again.

She does not praise nor condemn Grace for letting her sleep. But when her boots are on the ground, she says, “Captain, come with me. I have confidential information for you. As an Augment.”

That makes sense. Every Augment from that meeting is probably getting a talk right now. Grace is prepared for it, whatever it’s going to bring.

The base has gotten more crammed and chaotic over the years. They squeeze past crates, dripping pipes, a few people who don’t officially exist sleeping in corners. Dani’s office and quarters are now the same space, triple-sized compared to the officers' hotbunks. This room, the mess hall, and the pilot’s seat in a flyer are the most stable spaces in Grace’s world.

In the warm Edison-bulb light, Dani stands behind her desk. It’s weighted with papers – the most secure way to communicate without any Machine step. She fiddles with a paper clip. Her voice is rough after speaking for hours. Her five iconic braids are actually coming loose, unraveling. “About the Polarity Event. There’s a refuge planned for – Augmented soldiers. The bottom of a mineshaft. They say they will line it so you do not feel even a spark of static. It is a chance.” Dani drops the clip. "I insisted."

This is such typical, classic Dani, Grace feels herself smiling. “I figured they’d done the numbers. A hundred Augments against...everyone else?”

Dani sighs, long, exhausted. “They did. But it is not a hundred Augments, as of yesterday. Two more of you died.”

Grace remembers the nurse. “That’s what we’re for, isn’t it?” 

Inspired, Grace goes to one knee. “Dani. Ma’am. You talk about fucking with fate. Isn’t fucking with the whole world the way to do it? If it means we take out those machine motherfuckers once and for all, then kill me.”

“No, Grace, _no!_ _”_ Dani’s shriek of denial rocks Grace back. Grace watches, next, as Dani cracks.

She storms to Grace’s side of the desk, eyes dilated black, seizing up to lean on the desk. Grace leaps to her, catches Dani’s arm, finds herself dragged down. Dani has, strangely, the same riven, timeless face she had waking up on the flyer. 

“The point of all this is that you _don_ _’t_ die! I - I - ” Dani gulps air into her raw throat. “I am _so fucking tired_ of everything that happens because of me. I thought I could do it. That I could change fate. I – she told me, but I – ” With her free hand, Dani wipes tears away.

“I don’t know what happens next, Grace. I thought I did, once. But this future is so strange... so much... all I know, right now, is I want you to live.” She touches Grace’s face with a tear-salted hand. “Because so many others have died. For both of us.”

It’s too much. “Please. Don’t.” Grace turns her burning cheek away. “I still...I wasn’t just drunk that time. And I can’t lose you, too.”

She catches Dani’s shocked inhale. “But I…” Dani leaves that hanging.

Grace stands up. Looks down at Dani. Dani is haloed in numbers, contour lines, the light and information Grace’s Augments are lavishing on her. Because Grace’s animal heartbeat is telling her wiring that Grace is looking at the most important being in the world. That Grace, too, is seen, for all that she is: the way only Dani Ramos can see and forgive. 

Finally, Dani nods. “I will not touch you again unless you ask me to, Grace. But, if you want...if it is our fate…” Dani lifts her chin, meets Grace’s eyes. “You may touch me.” And she undoes her collar button.

It’s not much. All it exposes is the hollow of Dani’s throat, still as dented as when they were scavengers. The sides of her neck, as her pulse thrums. As Commander Dani Ramos, survivor, fighter, negotiator, swallows with nerves. The data-halo, her microexpressions, every tell around her is fear and yearning.

It’s all Grace needs to sweep Dani into her arms.

Grace thought she had her Augments under control but embracing Dani scrambles them, overloads her. Later on, she’ll remember three parts vividly.

The first kiss. Grace knows she’s rancid, that her mouth has a tang of metal – she tastes it herself – but Dani burrows and opens at the same time, her full mouth welcoming. Like she’s thirsted for this as much and as long as Grace has.

The lovemaking. Dani gives, and then takes, and Grace has never felt anything like it. Fierce with the years of want behind it. Knotted with sorrow for the long denial of it. Dani turns away, at one point, whispers, “I wish I was still beautiful for you.” Grace tells her that she is, kisses every one of her scars to prove it.

When Grace lays hands on Dani, she understands why Dani speaks of denying fate. That’s how fighting this for so long has felt. Giving in is the opposite, sweet gravity, inevitable, every magnetic cliché. Dani’s hands, tracing Grace's own scars, are lodestars, warm with energy. Grace understands, too, why some people talk about angels. For the beauty, the uninhibited joy, the terror of this woman giving her all – the way that when Dani opens and lets her touch, Grace is _home_ –

Lying together, crammed on the bed behind its curtain, as the base comes back to hammering, grumbling life. Grace hearing herself say, “They gave us a goddamn workshop on ‘officer liasons’ and ‘being discreet with your home base sex partner.’ But this is different. You’re different. So important. I – I won’t get you in trouble. I don’t want some asshole undermining you.” Thinking to herself, after all that, _I can_ _’t lose you_.

Dani, hair unfurled and wild as Grace hasn’t seen it in years, strokes Grace’s arm. “We are starting the end of the world. Again.” Dani turns her dark gaze up, like she can see through the ceiling. “There is no more right way to do this. God help me.”

After this twenty-four hours, Grace knows what Dani means by ‘this’.

Everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More thanks to sigmalibrae and dire_quail for beta reading of the finest calibre!  
> HOW do you win a war against an artificial intelligence and its resilient minions after your species is decimated by a nuclear war? This has been majorly handwaved by Terminator, Terminator II, and Terminator: Dark Fate.
> 
> Terminator: Salvation presents John Connor and ‘A robot who thought he was a human basically helped humans and controlled Skynet’ and ‘The defense grid was smashed. We broke the mainframes!’ Yes, there are logic issues, and this doesn’t apply to the T:DF timeline. Though Dani’s compassion towards Carl shows how, possibly, it could.
> 
> Somebody in a piece of meta hashed out how this might have gone. It’s highly probable that the T:DF team would have done something similar [based on their statements on ‘exploring the relationship with artificial intelligence.”](https://collider.com/what-future-terminator-sequels-will-explore/)
> 
> Which is great except, if that’s happening in the future, then why send Grace back in time?
> 
> In this story I have Legion as a more ruthless AI that’s done with people. Springboarding off 2020 AI technology, it’s beyond being reprogrammable by a human mind, and it’s got backups. It’s a return to the harsh and horrific urge beyond the Terminator in the first film – a force that can’t be bargained with.
> 
> A special tip of the hat to my friend silver-89 who guessed the same thing I did the first moment I mentioned it. MAGNETS!
> 
> Have some references:  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal  
> https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/electrum  
> https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/134433/how-did-the-resistance-manage-to-win-the-war-and-destroy-skynet-in-the-future


	4. The Gate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Humanity's about to win against Legion and the Machines when the news comes in. The Terminators have the key to time, and their target is Daniela Ramos. If Grace's unit can get to the temporal gate in time, they'll stop Legion using it. But Grace doesn't think they will. Because everything Grace knows about Dani, and their mad Machine-torn world, will make sense if Grace goes through the gate, herself...

Grace is combing through crumbling tunnels that had once been part of Los Angeles, seeking Dani’s troops. Specifically, officers. She was from Los Angeles before, but that’s not helping. Her Augmented senses are, pinpointing warm bodies, picking up voices. Her Augmented reflexes will keep her from getting shot by them. It’s a hazard of being an Augment, going down to ‘friendly fire.’

She’s got a message from the Commander when she finds them. Despite this, Grace is feeling useless. Because, for all that they’ve taken down another Legion node here, all the strutting and explosions, this is only a distraction. Humanity’s real action, now, is the Polarity Event. And Grace has nothing to do with that.

Grace isn’t one of the scientists who planned the Polarity Event. Not one of the engineers making it reality. Not even one of the nukescum scavengers finding metals, cables, rare parts for the engineers’ creations.

The Dysons are about to synchronise the last stage at the North and South Poles. If the Polarity Event goes as planned, when the Dysons throw their switches, it will trigger a magnetic pole reversal. A massive, worldwide EMP that will fry every piece of tech on Earth. Including the hoverfliers that brought the Dysons and their tech teams to the poles’ ice caps. They’ll be stranded there. Everyone involved is prepared to live wild - or die. They’re all heroes already.

Not a one of them is an Augment. After nuclear winter, the poles are brutal on every piece of tech. It’s one thing to re-engineer a ‘flyer or a drill, a tool that’s got one job. Augments have too much going on for that. On the ice, they’re unreliable. At least Legion’s drones and infiltrators are, too.

Grace rounds a corner and finds, amidst blackened concrete, the voices she’s been tracking. After giving the day’s password, she says, “Alert level two. Radio comms switch-off. This Legion node is officially down.”

One of the officers leaps. “Whooooo! Aw yeah!” He spins around in delight, punches a button on a walkie-talkie. “Comms down! Takin’ it to the troops!” He leaps off to spread the news.

The other one stabs his walkie-talkie into silence. “Got it.” He eyes Grace up and down, lingering on her bare arms, the flecks of ID tags that tell him her rank and honors. “ _Sir._ I hear your unit is Ramos’ favorite. Always where the action is, huh?”

His oily words puddle at Grace’s feet. When she’d become lovers with Dani, she’d known others would make something tainted of it. She accepts this as her fault. A soldier, a fighter, someone who’d signed up to die making a difference, shouldn’t be in love like she was. Too swept away to hide it. Too enamored to say _no_ to the compromises Dani offered to keep Grace close, for a time.

Grace leans in. Puts a hand on the man’s shoulder. Slides her thumb down to his clavicle. Presses. He inhales, grimacing in sudden agony.

She pins him to the wall. “Don’t fucking start.”

Then, Grace tilts her head back at a new sound. She shifts her hand to cover the man’s mouth before he can cuss her out. As Grace does, a raw recruit dashes up. After gaping for a second, the recruit says, “Harper to Ramos, right away.”

“Thanks, soldier. Let’s go.” Grace shoves the officer into the filthy wall a final time and turns on her heel, following.

Dani is at the heart of their victory, a blown-out basement. All around her, troops are destroying computer servers down to the chips, dragging out cables. They’ll wreck everything they can get their hands on. It won’t ever be enough. A whisper of Legion programming can lurk in an old laptop, a satellite’s computer, and continue its long plan someday: stripping Earth to an airless shell of minerals, a world for Machines alone. Only the Polarity Event will scour the earth of all that, damaging every chip from the ground to orbit. Including those inside the Augmented soldiers.

So Grace knows what it means when Dani meets her eyes, says with formal hollowness, “Captain Harper. It’s time. A ‘flyer is en route to pick you up.”

Time for Grace to take refuge, in a shelter that might keep the Augments alive. Grace silences her first words to say, instead, “Yes ma’am. Unit handover to Mathers?”

Dani nods. “I will come with you to your unit’s ‘flyer. For - handover.”

At the hoverflyer, they are silent as Grace picks up her duffel. She strokes the pilot’s yoke one last time, then holds out the ‘flyer’s unlock to Dani. With both hands, Dani clasps both the unlock, a graceless chunk of tech, and Grace’s fingers. Her brown hands, small and bony, are warm, like always. She says, “You don’t like this.”

Grace says, “Never did. I didn’t Augment to run for cover when we’re about to win.”

Dani’s eyes compress. Almost whispering, she says. “It is so much better than the alternative.”

“If it works. Hiding at the bottom of a mineshaft with however many pissed-off Augments are still alive this week.”

“Grace...it will not be so bad.” Dani tilts her sensuous, wracked face up: a once-beautiful woman worn down to her essence, silver hairs and fine softening over deep-cut cheekbones, dark eyes tight with sorrow, leaking tears. “Please.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Grace says. She twitches an Augmented eyelid to capture a photo. And kisses her lover.

It’s long and sweet and hungry. Commander Ramos’ status means Grace never gets enough of Dani. What she gets are stolen hours, rare nights, the sense that Dani holds out as long as she can before giving in to their magnetism. Again, Grace is stabbed with guilt for loving Dani too much, when the Resistance, the whole world, needs Commander Ramos.

Eventually even Grace has to breathe. “I’ll do it. For all that I’ll hate being stuck down there...while you sort out the world for assholes who don’t deserve it.”

Dani smiles a little below those tears. “There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. What is happening now proves it. I will miss you.”

There’s another embrace, one that can’t be long enough to get them through days, weeks, months apart. Grace’s heart wrenches at the goodness of feeling Dani nestle against her, with a little head-nudge against Grace’s shoulder. Finally, as always, they let go, to walk away separately.

On hearing the news, Mathers, Grace’s second in command, asks, “Heard you pinned Strickland to the wall. You getting the brig?”

“I can’t talk about it,” Grace says, grimly. There’ll be an announcement about the Polarity Event right before it’s triggered. But no sooner.

Mathers swears creatively and at length, wrapping up with, “Every ass on your ‘flyer’d stand witness to you and Ramos being on the level. That circuit-sucker’s fuckin’ jealous.”

Grace lets him go on, telling himself a story that she doesn’t contradict.

* * *

After all that, the ‘flyer to pick Grace up is late. Typical. That means Grace is kicking her heels at the vehicle dump when it happens.

A patrol of grunts arrive. They have three dogs with them. One dog starts barking like crazy. Grace sighs, used to her Augments striking anti-Terminator guard dogs as Terminator tech. The grunts are letting it slide. Grace ignores it until a light, young voice grabs her by saying, “Is Ramos here? We in time to help?”

“Shut up. Finding out’s our job.” One of the grunts eyes the miscellaneous soldiers and bawls, “Highest officer here? Highest officer?”

Not knowing what’s up, everyone points at Grace. Grace raises her hand, and makes a gesture to one side. Now the grunts know she’s an Augment, too. And Mathers, who is waiting with her, with a handful of her unit, says, “Thought those patrols went out with two dogs – not three.”

The lead grunt shoves someone at her. “This one of your runners?”

Grace herself face to face with a skinny, tallish kid. The same teen age she’d been when she’d lied her way into being a cadet. The same complexion as her, too, blue-eyed under ground-in dirt. The kid’s classic nukescum, in worn leather and denim, feathers matted into a long dun ponytail, already missing a tooth. They stare back at Grace from a place beyond exhaustion and terror, where going forwards is all that’s left. This is what Dani saved Grace from. “No. What do you want with Ramos?”

The grunt shoves the kid again, between the shoulder blades. “Talk fast.”

“I. My name’s Lanny. I came down from the north, th’ coast. One o’ your pilots gave us – gave me this.” Shakily, Lanny holds up a black data drive. Grace feels her own eyes widen. “Your pilot, she crashed where we lived. Died.‘Fore she did, she said that Legion, the Terminators, they had the key to time. That it’d be the end of us all. Said we had to get this to your Commander, Ramos. That Ramos had to see this. Her last words...”

Fuck. Dani had this on one of her intel lists. People shrugged when they saw it. There was enough going on without Legion turning to attempts at time travel. But it seemed like Dani had been right yet again.

Grace takes the black drive. Smacks it against her left hand to crack it. Lanny yelps, “Hey!” The extra dog yips, too. Grace ignores that to place her most wired finger on exposed circuitry.

Grace isn’t the computer inside her. But she can tell it to run, and her Augment’s vision will show her the results. It carries extra data she can call up, like records, and the Legion-decoding algorithm nicknamed The Worm. That’s what she runs now. No, Grace isn’t the computer. But something prickles the edge of Grace’s mind as the connection takes and The Worm runs. A shadow of a sense backed up by a data tick, a progress bar, a data display.

The result is a flood of data Grace barely understands. But Legion is still linked to human language. There’s phrases Grace sort of gets. TEMPORAL DISPLACEMENT. SOCIAL VARIABLES. QUANTUM STABILITY. OPTIMAL SUCCESS WINDOW. MEXICO CITY. And a phrase that punctuates the data, again and again, like a bullet every time. TARGET DANIELA RAMOS.

The Resistance had done their work too well, these past two years. Striking at Legion’s nodes, saving and recruiting humans. Crediting the brave troops and their fearless leaders. Endless distractions to keep Legion’s attention away from the Polarity Event – with Commander Dani Ramos at the heart of them.

Now Legion wanted to kill Dani so that she never was. 

“The kid’s telling the truth. This is proof. I’m taking this to the Commander now. Mathers - when they come to take me away,” Grace said, grimly, “Hold them off. And requisition the flyer.”

* * *

Half an hour later, Dani has taken them to where the tech crews are. They are back in the blown-out basement with the gutted tech. Grace is clenching the drive in one hand and electrodes in the other, feeling the near-sensation of her computer processing, dumping data on a screen. Only Dani glances at Grace, occasionally. Everyone else is staring at the data, going gray.

Grace refrains from rolling her eyes as a tech repeats what Grace just told them. “Legion’s decided it can’t win this war so it’ll make sure it never happens by changing history. Going back in time. To kill Dani Ramos, before she was the Commander.”

A second tech says, “Why her? She’s not the General, or the Dysons, or – or some key scientist – “

Dani bows her head. “No. But I brought them all together. A legion of angels to defeat one Legion.”

It’s time for Grace’s strategy. Her chance to be the hero. “What if we go where this time thing is, Mexico City, and destroy it?”

Dani, grayer than any of them, is shaking her head. The first tech says, “Look at the date stamps of when. That’s tonight. You’re not gonna be in time to stop it. Before…”

“My unit could get there. If we went now. They’re holding a ‘flyer at the gate for us. It’s supposed to take me, but it’ll take the lot of us. If you order it to.” Grace lifts her chin, proud of the second part. “If we get there and it’s too late: fine. We send me through the gate, too, and I stop their infiltrator. Legion’s only planning to send one, right?”

“Fuck,” one of the techs breathes.

“She could do it,” says the other tech. “It’s what Augments are for – picking out a Terminator and taking them down.”

Dani slices her hand down. “No. Grace –”

Grace gestures at the techs. “They’ve gotta know about Polarity if they’re still here. Either I’m going to fry when that happens or I’m going to hide out for years underground and maybe _still_ fry. I was fine with that. They warned me I’d die when I signed up to be an Augment. I wanted to make a difference when I did. This way, I can.”

The world contracts to Dani’s shocked, pained face. Grace drops to her knees. “Please. You saved me. Let me save you.”

Dani starts to shake her head and doesn’t stop. “Grace. If you go through the time gate, I haven’t saved you. Do you understand me?”

“Then I’ll save you anyway. Who else will? It’s not just the Terminators. I met you three years after Judgement Day. I remember your stories. I can pick you out of any crowd. I can – it’s like they said. It’s got to be me. Please.”

Dani stops shaking her head to breathe. For her tears are escaping, now, sheeting down her face. Choking on it, she says, “Yes.”

They’re barred from touching each other by the embarrassed techs. Someone else in the way: the story of Grace’s life, around Dani. One of the techs coughs. The other clears their throat. “Uh, Harper. How did your unit get this, again?”

Grace stands. “This nukescum kid brought it in…said one of our pilots went down up North.”

Dani wipes her face. “What else did they say? Wait. Take me to them. Then take yourself for a medcheck. Make the medics give you everything you need to – to keep going.” Dani takes out a pad of precious paper, scribbles on it. “And have them do this.”

Grace can’t believe the delay, until she sees the note. And realizes what it means. What’s behind Dani’s lifelong conviction that they’ll win against the Machines. Why Dani had been so relieved to send Grace, her best soldier, off to kick her heels underground. Why she’d never named the sharp-eyed protector who’d warned her about the future. Every turn away from Grace on Dani’s side, every bitten lip and meaningful silence – Grace knows why it happened, now.

Grace’s plan is going to fail. They won’t stop Legion sending an infiltrator through the time gate.

And it’s going to succeed, too. Because Grace is going to follow. To find Dani in the past. And Dani has hidden that, all their time together.

* * *

Grace still hasn’t recovered from the enormity of it all when she reports back to the camp gate. It’s the usual chaos of a unit packing up, with only one circle of calm: the space around Commander Ramos. Grace goes to it, to her.

Dani asks, as if she’d never wept, “Are you ready?”

“I am, except.” Grace jacks up her shirt, the armor over it. The newly-tattooed skin there still stings. “They put this on me upside down. I can’t read it from this angle.”

It’s a set of GPS coordinates, tattooed across Grace’s side in red ink – all the medtechs had to hand for a fast job. Grace made them check where it goes to. A badlands site, the edge of a nowhere that used to be called Texas.

Dani sighs deeply. “It will be all right.”

Grace leans in, says, significantly, “So. If we’re not there in time and I go through. Any, uh. Advice? Message from you to the other you?”

Dani looks away. “I am a very different person, in the past. You will think I am very stupid.”

“Never,” Grace whispers.

Dani whispers back, “I had not met my – protector yet. I knew nothing of this future. So tell me slowly, if you can. I am not going to take this well. And do not say that we were lovers. It is so different, then. You will see.” Dani looks Grace in the eyes once more, snaring her, to say, “Let people help you. Us.”

Grace smacks over the tattoo. “That’s what this is about, huh?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not a message to you.” Grace hears the whine in that, remembers her younger self for the second time that day.

Dani clearly does, too, because she smiles. “You are the message, Grace. You and what you will say.” Dani inhales, whispers, “You’ll always protect me. I’ll always love you.”

Grace swallows. “Dani,” she says, or tries to, then shifts that to, “Uh – ma’am,” because behind her, someone’s saying _Ramos will confirm._ The chaos of a unit departing is waiting to swallow them both.

Dani tilts her head, looks beyond Grace. “Can you take someone extra with your unit? Someone useful.”

Like she can say no to Dani right now. “Totally. Anyone who’ll help.”

“The messenger who came. Lanny.”

Grace yelps, “The damn kid?”

“I asked what Lanny wanted for thanks. For saving us all. The answer was to help your unit.”

“Fuck.” Dani’s slight smile sends Grace to look over her shoulder. The kid’s there, probably has been for a minute.

Grace says to Lanny, “You want to off some machine motherfuckers?”

Lanny’s thin shoulders square up. “They killed my friend. He died ‘cause of me. I owe it to him.” At that, Lanny’s damn dog starts barking again, straining her rope to snarl at Grace. 

Grace says, “Fine. Can you shut that dog up?”

Dani reaches out. “I had a dog, long ago. I would be honored to look after her. Until you return.”

Lanny hands Dani the rope, almost stammering. “Commander. I, I see why the pilot died with your name the last thing she said.” Grace grits her teeth.

Mathers comes over. “You good to go, boss? Final checklist waiting, got the sapper addendum.”

Inevitably, with nobody talking to Dani for two seconds, someone horns in. “Commander, got a question here...”

Grace is furious. All these people are blocking her own goodbye to Dani. But she’s got what she wanted. Claimed it as her duty. And time is wasting – time is her enemy, now, along with Legion and its Terminators and one particular infiltrator. She says, “Final check! Troops to transport! Mathers, strap this kid in.”

Grace’s last sight of Dani is only possible with Augmented eyes. As the flyer careens into the sky, Grace leans over, peers out. Dani is small in the gate of the camp, swept by a hard wind. Braving it to be there while Grace careens away. The dog weaves around Dani’s legs, and Grace is glad to see it, until Dani falls to her knees. That’s wrong, Grace should be the one kneeling. She should’ve said a thousand things to stop that, to make this all okay.

Her eyes catch the last movement of Dani’s lips. Grace can make out the words, though she isn’t sure if it’s a prayer. _Vaya con Dios..._

* * *

Grace hates being on a flyer when she’s not piloting. Worse, she’s been stuck next to Lanny, who keeps staring at her. All Grace wants to do is replay her last glimpse of Dani, flick through her Augment photo captures. Contemplate Dani smiling, sad, stern, beloved, lost to be found and saved. Strengthen her resolve to do one of two terrible things. Destroy Legion’s time-gate and brace herself to endure the Polarity Event unsheltered. Or go through it and hunt down an obsessed Rev-9 in the strange, soft past.

Grace doesn’t want to turn over what Dani said, in case that happens: _don_ _’t tell me we were lovers_. But Grace can’t stop herself. It’s baffling. Ironically, Grace going back in time will flip their age difference – Grace will be the one who’s thirteen years older. Is that why? The darkness of Grace’s blank years sticks to Grace’s thoughts about it. Maybe she has been obsessive, clinging, too in love with Dani, and Dani is guarding her younger self.

Dani wouldn’t do it to be cruel, Grace tells herself. She’s seen Dani stern, desperate, making hard decisions, sacrifices. But never, as Dani did any of that, was she cruel.

Grace wants to unpack that more. Instead, she’s getting dragged into shouted conversation. Mathers, on Grace’s other side, leans in to address the clean-faced kid. “What d’you want us to call you? He, she, they, somethin’ else?”

The kid looks shocked. Grace, stuck in the middle, adds, “Civilized people choose their own pronouns.”

Lanny’s eyes widen. “They. ‘Cause I didn’t walk from Willamette for me. I did it for everyone. That pilot and the Commander and Breed.”

Mathers snorts. “Breed? What kind of a name is Breed?”

Lanny says, deadpan, “My friend what died while we tried to find your Commander.”

“Oh. Sorry. ‘S a long way to Willamette. Thousand miles of badlands between there and L.A.” Mathers leans in more, half-crossing Grace. “How’d you make it through? You take it out in trade? Or you a cannibal?”

Grace can tell he’s kind of kidding. Lanny, who can’t, lifts their chin. “I took what the good Lord brought me.”

Grace clenches her teeth. That might’ve been her, if Dani hadn’t taken her in. Mathers’ laugh is uneasy. “Hey, don’t eat us. I’m marinated in bad liquor and Harper, there, is an Augment. She’ll taste like tinfoil and motor oil.”

“Mathers, shut up. That’s an order.” Grace turns to Lanny. “Augmented means I’m a supersoldier, kind of. I am human. Just enhanced.”

“Gosh,” Lanny breathes.

That admiration makes Grace uncomfortable. “You and your friend must’ve been tough, to get sent with that message.”

Lanny looks down. “Honest, they prob’ly wanted rid of us. We weren’t gonna be he-men or give ‘em babies. Just a pair of sinners. We found your pilot and I thought, let’s do somethin’ big, save folks. Then on the way, one of those killing machines did for Breed…my fault.” The kid’s knuckles go pale on their rifle. “Anything I can do to take ‘em down, I owe him.”

Mathers, obediently silent, looks like a kicked puppy.

Grace is on her way to her destiny. But she put herself back in charge when she gave Mathers that order. She inhales. “Don’t make us regret it. You get an order, you follow it. You’re not armored. So stick to the rear…”

As Grace tells Lanny what’s what, she can’t believe Dani stuck them all with this annoyance. A wide-eyed kid, stupidly determined to fight and find revenge. A fucking burden, sucking up her attention. How the hell is she supposed to run a unit and keep herself alive long enough to save the world with a damn teenager in tow -

And Grace realizes, like a thunderclap, how much Dani loved her all along. Lovers or not.

* * *

The time gate’s site is amidst the wreckage of Mexico City. Down here, everything’s paler. The rubble is bleached, tumbled with faded reddish tiles. The sky is a lighter gray, going blue as night falls. This is where Dani is from. Grace thinks of Dani here, in the wreck of her old home. Would she have been as untouched as Grace was by the ruins of L.A.? Or would it have mattered, to her? Grace has the feeling it would’ve been the second one.

They coast above the target. Grace leans out. The courtyard of this half-shattered apartment block is filled with a rough, dark concrete dome. Like a vast cancer. “All clear,” Grace cries. The hoverflier squeezes down.

Grace’s Augments confirm the way in, tracing live wires. There’s wheel tracks to follow, too, and along them, absurdly, a set of footprints. Only one set, going one way. Following them leads to their destination. Inside the courtyard, right where the dome meets the ground, there’s a thick, scientific seal of a door. One of the sappers tries it, says, “Shut. I can pick it, but that takes time. Sir?”

Grace steps up to it. Reads where the lock is, places her hands against its lever, made for Machine clips to open and close. With one Augmented pull, she cracks it open – onto darkness, spangled with a few LEDs. Lanny, who’s been quiet and in the rear, like they should be, mutters, “Jesus!”

“Formation,” Mathers says. “Gunners up. Harper, scan. Any bad news?”

“No,” Grace says. Her machine senses are quiescent. But every cell of her that’s still human is on edge, down to her teeth.

She’s startled when Lanny pipes up again. “I’ll go first,” they say. “They kill me, you’ll know.” Grace exhales in frustration, but nods. She can’t argue with Lanny being expendable.

The kid goes in. Grace strains to hear screams, but all Lanny does inside is step, light feet ringing on hollow metal, and breathe, quick with fear. It’s the soldiers beside her who start to mutter. _Geez, will ya...oh, that_ _’s... Shit. That_ _’s a sight._ All said softly, with wonder. Grace looks up.

The sky is alive with auroras, great green and blue sheets of them, darted with pink and red, north to south. It’s spectacular. “Where do they come from?” one soldier asks.

“Sunspots, sometimes. Or the atmosphere’s magnetic field.” Grace says it and twitches. Her vision stutters with static. Pain sparks her fingertips. Fuck. Have they thrown the switch for the Polarity Event already? The auroras above pulse brighter as Grace thinks it: static blinds her again. Her time is running out. “Lanny!” Grace shouts. “Report in!”

Lanny slips out. “I went t’ the middle and back. Nothin’ stopped me. It’s got a path, for one to walk...and at th’ heart of it...” The kid shakes their head, heart still pounding.

“Let’s see,” Grace says. Two by two, the soldiers go in. Immediately, they’re forced into single file. The soldier on point lights up the place and curses. When Grace steps inside, at first she feels relief. The concrete dome blocks some of what’s happening magnetically in the open air. She might live long enough, in here, to get the job done. But she curses, too, when she sees what the others see.

The space is bigger than it looks from the outside, carved down as well as domed up. The result is a bizarre sphere, walled with shielding cups of dark concrete, ready to absorb the unnameable forces at its heart. A thin metal walkway, its human scale out of place, crosses to that heart. At the center, there’s a nearly round platform, a plateau topped with dark metal. A blunt stalactite of technology hovers over it, lights dim.

The Machines have built their future, here: a preview of the world they want to have. It’s vast. Magnificient. Awful. Legion plundered a whole city and distilled it down to this. All to destroy Dani Ramos. Not even from hate – purely because it’s the most logical thing to do. Every scientific miracle is here to kill, every empty space in it a hint of the Machines’ ideal void. It even has its own maleific atmosphere, cold enough that Grace can see her breath, soulless enough that Grace vibrates at its wrongness.

Grace isn’t alone in that. Lanny says, voice echoing, “I feel the devil in my bones, here.”

Grace mutters, “The Polarity Event out there...the time gate in here.” The dome takes her words, amplifies them too.

 _Polarity what?_ Grace hears. _Yeah, what?_

“It’s a top secret project. Think of it as a legion of angels – to take down the Legion that built this.”

“Amen,” Lanny mutters.

Mathers takes the point, runs up to a console. “The fuck is this? Machines took over our fuckin’ radio waves. Since when do they need to read screens?”

“Since they made Infiltrators,” Grace says, grimly. “They get data visually. Like humans. Besides, even Machines have their secrets. Like this place.”

Mathers says, “Both sides fighting the same way...we’re all fucked up. Harper, can you crack this code?”

Grace joins Mathers at the console, a curious yellow screen with black text. She’s glad she doesn’t have to connect to this to get a bead on its meaning. Instead, she bids her computer to run the Worm on what she sees, and translation scrolls across her vision. “It’s instructions. What the infiltrator needs to do to get through.”

“They left the fucking instructions open?”

Grace sees more. She clenches the console’s edges. “Because it’s too late. Legion’s sent its agent. The infiltrator’s gone through.”

“FUCK!”

“Calm down, Mathers. I’m following it.” She reaches out and flicks some switches below the console. The space is shaken by a deep hum. “I’ll go through this gate, too, take it out on the other side. That was always the plan.”

Mathers says, “What if we get a Terminator coming back through this?”

“Then make it a one-way trip. When I tell you to, press this button here.” Grace points at a red button. “That runs the gate. Once I’m through, blow this place to kingdom come. Like we would’ve if we’d gotten here first. That’s an order.”

Mathers gives her a long look. In this place’s strange shadows, he is aged, primal: his face the face of every man bewildered by time and death.

Grace gives him a breath to get used to it. Herself, between man and machine, she’s been dying since Judgement Day. Rubble under her back as she’s being threatened. A closed door as she waits for a firing squad. A Rev-9 slithering through her chest. The agony of Augmentation. Dani Ramos was always on the other side, whether she knew it or not, to get her through. Grace knows it for sure here.

Mathers recovers. “Yes sir. Gunners! Take it on out, get sappers and ordnance! Wait for our hail. The rest of you, off the dance floor!”

Half the unit scrambles away, hammers out. The ones left drop down, off the platform, to ring the base of the time gate.

This leaves Lanny beside Grace. Lanny says, “You’re goin’ back in time. It’ll be like you never were, maybe...”

“I’ve got my reasons.” A whole lifetime’s full. “If I can’t stop a Terminator from killing Dani Ramos, I don’t want to come back.”

Grace can say that knowing what she’s going to be. It’s come to her at last, the crown of this place’s madness. She _will_ be a hero. She’ll save the woman she loves and change the world. To get that started, she downs her blaster, unclips her armor. 

“What are you doing?” Mathers calls.

“I read the fucking instructions! Anything going through has to be covered in living tissue. My own clothes will microwave me.” She peels them away. 

Naked, Grace turns to Lanny. “You say you take what the Lord gave you. Then take this.” Grace dumps shed clothes on top of the soldier’s armor and blaster. “All yours, now. With an order for you. If you leave this place and the ‘flyer’s fried – guide these people home. You walked a thousand badland miles to find Dani Ramos. You’ll do it again. You hear me?”

Lanny gapes. “Yes, sir.”

“You tell the Commander I followed every order. Every order she gave me!” She can’t tell one of her unit that without killing them with embarrassment. “Get this shit out of here. Go up by Mathers.”

Lanny scoops up Grace’s dumped gear, steps away. “I’ll pray for you...”

Grace walks the last few steps of steel to the platform. Her unit rings the base of it tightly, like Grace’s nudity matters. Like history’s watching. There’s a circle in the middle. Grace stands there. It’s pure metal, smooth and cold as ice. “Mathers. Now.”

Mathers says, “Copy that. Now!” There’s a deep _vrrrrrrrm_ , the kind of noise that’s felt as well as heard. The temperature drops more, like time carries a storm front. The technology hanging above comes to life, shifting, clicking. More LED speckles, red and green, make the dome’s darkness blacker. The unit scrambles away from it all, save Mathers and Lanny, pinned by the console.

Mathers says, sounding hollow, “Hey, kid – Lanny – you got that prayer? I could use it.”

Lanny folds Grace’s blaster to their thin chest. “Uh. Um. Our. _Our Lord who_ , uh, _has mercy_ – ”

Mathers adds, “Jesus motherfucking Christ!”

For the metal beneath Grace’s feet is lighting up in cold blue patterns, wheels of time. Patterns that crackle, change, _rise._

“Fuck! Shit! It’s working!”

 _“Kindle the fire of the holy spirit_ – ”

The border of the blue patterns cracks open, releasing more light. Arcs of metal, unsealed, rise and descend, to surround where Grace stands, framing her in a quartered sphere. They click into place – and their edges flare with blue fire. Its crackle leaps between the arcs, uniting in veils of blue aurora, almost too vivid for human eyes. Chill energy crawls over Grace’s skin, prickling every hair.

Then, with another _vrrrrrrrm_ , the sphere of fire begins to rotate.

“Fucking fuck! Somebody record this!”

 _“Take away from me the heart of stone_ – ”

The uncanny energy flares. Grace can tell it would’ve torn apart metal outside her flesh. As it is, the metal _inside_ her flesh is vibrating: a devil in her bones. It’s so intense, Grace hallucinates that it’s lifting her up – until she opens her eyes and finds it’s real. The forces that wrap her have lifted her a foot off the ground. Her Augmented weight is nothing.

“Sir I’m trying but all I’m getting is static – ”

 _“Give me a heart of flesh, a heart to love and adore you_ – ”

Grace is wracked with epiphany. All this Machine soullessness, logic worse than hate, all her human pain. It’s taken all the love Dani inspires for humanity to stand up and fight it. It takes all the love Grace feels to endure it. She can never love Dani too much, never love her wrong, ever be crazy enough about her. Not if it gets her through this. To the Dani on the other side. Who needs her so, so much.

 _“A heart to delight in you, to follow_ – ”

The sphere is whirling, now, a mad blur of blue light. Grace curls in on herself. Stripped down, elemental, naked, past and future inside her, she gives herself to Dani. To the time gate. And

its cold fire goes white and

despite her whole life and

her run towards death

her grief and metal

she doesn’t know what pain means

so time is going to show her

_now_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To the ice caps – The North Pole is frozen over again thanks to nuclear winter!
> 
> Lanny _who?_ If Grace is a parallel Kyle, there’s another parallel character – queer-coded Lanny from a piece of Terminator's extended canon, _Terminator: All My Futures Past_. This is a crazy Terminator comic from the ‘80s where John Connor got the warning about the Terminator time travel plans from a semi-feral youngster, and we see Kyle Reese going back through the time gate. I liked it much better than the leaden ham-handedness of _Terminator: Genisys_ so I’ve given that a Legion!Verse flip here. If you want to see an extract of the comic, [I did a post over on Tumblr.](https://thebyrchentwigges.tumblr.com/post/614360874844635136/whos-got-the-crack-terminator-comics)
> 
> _The time gate seen here is the one from _Terminator: Genisys._ That part was cool, at least. _
> 
> __Prayer is early Catholic by Ambrose of Milan.__


	5. The Price

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At the end of the Machine War, where it all began, Dani reflects on what's been lost - and what might yet be. And if Grace survived saving Dani…and a _second_ Judgement Day …can she tread the line between warping time and changing fate?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> POV change - Dani is the voice of this chapter. And a light warning or two for Dani's memories of the death of Sarah Connor, and somebody self-medicating with recreational drugs.

Over the distinctive whine of a hoverflier, somebody shouts at her. “We there yet, Commander?”

Her reply is oblique, distracted. “You can call me Dani.”

“You sure?”

Dani shrugs. She has been called a lot of things: had them laid at her feet, spat in her face, hung on her like medals she never wanted. “I was a Commander. But now that this war against the Machines is over…we will see how long that lasts.”

The young scout, Lanny, says, “I’m real honored that you’re taking me home, ma’am.”

Dani lets ‘ma’am’ slide. “I would like to see where you are from, and show them that what you did saved lives. And you see we are having a detour along the way.” She says, to the front of the 'flyer, “You have the coordinates?” 

“How could I fucking forget?” snaps the pilot.

Dani leans back, unruffled. Being a Commander after a final victory has let Dani have this. The privilege of flight, a breath of freedom. Dani hasn’t done this in good conscience since her twenties. Before Judgement Day. It feels strange to be stealing time for herself, even honoring the dead, trying to make amends. 

They are flying low. Dani can see the ground. Below is what winning this war looks like: a dust-skirled, desolate plain. Here and there, it is dotted with downed drones, stilled mech-tanks. Tech that had died in the Polarity Event.

Dani glances at the console of this ‘flyer and its pilot. A little circuit-based technology had survived the Polarity Event. This was one of the first hoverfliers. Older versions, simpler ones, had made it through the storms of magnetism better. And this particular ‘flyer had been at the bottom of a mineshaft when the first magnetic storms swept the world.

“Uh, Dani. We’re landing.” Lanny’s dog yips. “Settle down, girl.”

Dani smiles at the youth Grace had sent back from the time-gate to her. Lanny had guided Grace’s unit back on foot, through wilds and badlands. The unit’s ‘flyer hadn’t survived Polarity. Along with the unit, Lanny brought details about what Grace had done, more about the time-gate than Grace had ever shared. Exactly what Dani had needed, after the time gate had taken young Grace.

Dani remembers Grace’s first words to her, when they’d met in her own youth, after Grace’s passage through time. _I’m your first mistake._ All the rest of Dani’s mistakes tumble through her mind. Perhaps, at their destination, she can make them right at last.

They land. Lanny leaps down and gives her a hand out. Lanny's lean hound-dog prances after Dani, weaves around them both, wagging her tail. Dani reaches down and pets the dog between her silky ears. One thing that Dani had taken forwards, from everything that had happened, was taking comfort where she could.

Lanny looks around. “This was the place? Where a Terminator lived like a man?”

“Like a human,” Dani says. “The only one who was ever on our side. This is where we came together and agreed to fight Legion and its Machines. And we never stopped.”

“Gosh.”

“I will tell you more…in a moment.” Dani steps away, to stand in front of what was once a house.

They have flown to the coordinates of Carl’s cabin. With the ‘flyer at her command, Dani could have gone to a lot of other places. Ground Zeroes, the cabin she’d stayed in until Judgement Day, graves. But Dani always likes to think of beginnings.

Across North America, there are rainshadows and refuges that had been touched lightly by Judgement Day, like the place Lanny is from. Carl’s cabin is not one of these refuges any more. Its valley is half-filled with windblown ash, its trees stripped to bare trunks. The cabin and garage are down to jagged foundations. Carl’s old armory shed, once tucked among trees, is in easy sight across bare ground, its door and roof gone. 

A thin wind sings through the bare trees, mournful. But, above, the gray clouds of nuclear winter are thinning. There are hopeful streaks of blue. And in the lee of the buildings, small plants are starting to grow.

Dani turns to that wind, lets it scour her. Reaching up, she undoes her five braids, her trademark as a Commander, one by one. Lets her hair stream and tangle in that wind. Gives herself to this place and to memory.

Such moments are never long enough. Behind her, Dani hears Lanny calling into the ‘flyer. “You comin’ out?”

The only reply Lanny gets is, “In my own time.”

Lanny scuffs back over to Dani. “I don’t think much of this pilot. Cursing up a storm, huffing the wicked weed. Sassing you!”

“People need to feel better. Especially after the war.”

The pain of being here is useful. It reminds Dani that she needs to feel better, herself, to keep going. She’s had so little time to think or breathe, for years. Every decision has been so momentous. Dani adds, “Don’t mind her. I am glad you are here.” She hadn’t wanted to do this alone.

She never had.

* * *

_Dani remembered when it was three of them. Dani, Sarah, Grace. In the months before Judgement Day, and the weeks after, first planning, then acting. At night, she’d taken refuge in Grace’s arms - sometimes Grace and Sarah’s arms, together. Their world had ended, after all, and they were waiting for the war around them to change._

_Until the day Sarah’s government satphone, a connection to Major Dean, pinged with a message – from Major Dean’s little son. Dean had died. The boy's situation, supposed to be shelter, was all kinds of fucked up. And he had two sisters, too._

_Dani had wanted them all to go and find them. They were children, they’d promised to help Dean’s family if he needed it, Dani couldn’t help her family but maybe –Sarah had said it was too dangerous, that she was the one who owed Dean a debt: she’d go. Grace then shocked Dani to the core. “Send me. I’m the one who has a chance of surviving out there. Besides… I was that kid. And it sucked.”_

_Dani remembered Sarah’s knowing nod. Her own nod, too, while biting back her sobs, unable to hold back the tears. Unable to say what she feels - no don't I love you stay with me - and live with herself._

* * *

Dani blinks herself back to the present. She says to Lanny, “Hardly anyone knows Grace came back in time to save me. Only you, and those in her unit.” Such a sacrifice: so little known.

Lanny says, “Can’t ever forget it, ma’am. Watching a super-soldier go through a time gate – like an angel given over to Hell. Did she _change_ time, when she found you back there? Or is it always the same, and things happen the way they’s meant to?”

“I think it was the first one. After I was saved from the Terminator, in the past…we came here, for a time. We were injured. We needed to recover. It was not like this, then. It was beautiful.” Like all the squandered past had been.

“That building, there, was an armory. This is where my protector taught me how to fight. Where she told me more about the Terminators and this future.” 

Lanny can take a cue. “What was she like?”

“Tough. Strong. An expert soldier. She had lived her war for years. It had damaged her as much as it gifted her, to help me when I needed her.” Dani feels her smile light up and fade in the same moment, remembering the woman and her loss. “Her name was Sarah Connor.”

“Sarah helped me not die of despair around Judgement Day. For she showed me what it was to be there when someone needed you. Terminators had come through time for Sarah, as well. First for her, then for her son. She changed time along the way, so that her future did not exist any more.”

Lanny gasps. “You’re saying she changed time, herself!”

“She changed fate, yes. But knowing Sarah taught me that there is a price for that.”

Dani bows her head, thinking of when she had begun to pay that price, herself.

* * *

_Dani remembers when it had been two of them, her and Sarah. Wrangling neighbors, refugees, a whole small community into survival. Waiting for Grace’s satphone ping each night, sent through her Augments. After getting that confirmation Grace was alive, taking refuge in each other’s arms._

_Until the morning she’d woken up and noticed Sarah patterned with small bruises. Dani had apologised. Sarah had said, matter-of-factly, “It’s not you. It’s a sign of cancer. Leukemia.”_

_Sarah inspected her arm while Dani went cold. “Seen it enough on folks staggering in here. I’m surprised it took so long, after the nukes.”_

_Dani had exploded. Raged at her. “You talk like you know when you can’t know. It’s stress. Nutrition. Something not so crazy.”_

_Sarah had snapped, the way she always did at the end of her patience. “First, it’s my fucking body. I know when I feel like crap. And second, I am crazy.” She’d gone on to prove that with what she said next._

_Chasing Terminators and time-gates had its price, Sarah claimed. She was plagued by glimpses of futures not to be. Quantum detours not taken. Not dreams, though they bookended her sleep. Broken futures, she called them. Was this every night, Dani had asked? Pretty much. Did it change over time? Yes, as futures shifted. What didn’t happen, or what nearly happened again and again, gave Sarah hints of what was likely. Such as Judgement Day, and her own death. “Take it from me, I’m a late model of myself. In most futures, I’m long dead.”_

_Dani had avoided that, asking, instead, “What did you see last night?”_

_Sarah went oddly gentle. “It was a real dream. Not a broken future. I talked to Kyle…” Her own lost protector against the first Terminator. “That’s why I’m telling you this.”_

_Dani had swallowed. “Do you see - dream of - Grace?”_

_“Hardly ever. Even after I met her. Take it as a sign she keeps going.”_

_Dani had held off believing until Sarah’s undeniable crash. A week after that, her mentor and lover was dead._

_They’d buried Sarah. Then, Dani had left that place, refuge though it was, sending a satphone message as she went. It had been too painful to stay. The only thing to do was what Sarah had done: keep moving. Young Grace was out there, somewhere. It was Dani’s turn, now, to save a child from the end of the world, and the world as well…_

* * *

Lanny is clearly moved by Dani’s story. “I’ll speak for her next time I pray.”

A cool voice from the ‘flyer says, “Praying for Sarah Connor? She was as lost a cause as I am.” And a heavy tread rings the ‘flyer’s metal as the pilot steps down.

Lanny’s dog starts and barks at her. She is tall and raw-boned, weathered and seamed, wearing a thin flying suit under a battered, sleeveless leather jacket. The sleeves of the flying suit are rolled back, revealing corded lower arms criss-crossed with scars. Her hair hides under a leather pilot’s helmet, worn over harrowed eyes – eyes that are still the bluest Dani has ever seen. As she eases down, she reaches into a pocket, lights one hand-twisted joint off the stub of the one between her lips.

Lanny pulls their dog close. “Can’t believe you’re still toking.”

“After what I’ve been through? Till the day I die. You should try some. It’ll do you good.”

Lanny tightens. “I’m gonna take this girl to do her business. We’ll have a look around and think about what the _good_ people here did.” They scoop up a stick of deadwood and toss it for the dog to chase. The dog dashes for it, brings it to meet Lanny, all silently. Maybe the next generation of dogs will be allowed, by their owners, to bark at something besides a Terminator.

They both watch as the youth and the dog lope off, following the traces of plants. Dani’s companion grumbles, “If only I’d known, when I’d sent the damn kid back to you, what I was doing to myself.”

Dani says, “Grace.”

Grace looks away. “You’re the only one left who calls me that.” It’s true. Grace Madison Randolph Harper had had plenty of names to rearrange. To hide behind after Judgement Day, to keep the world from warping around two Grace Harpers.

Dani continues. “You hear how much Lanny admires you. When are you going to tell them?”

Grace snorts. “That I’m me? The sainted angel that went through the time gate? I’m not going to spoil a great story. I know when I can’t compete with myself. ” Her last words have a bitter edge.

“Grace…” Dani repeats. She’d thought they’d have this conversation later, in a green and peaceful place, just the two of them. But Dani hasn’t negotiated for more than two decades for nothing. She knows it’s starting now, amidst these ashes.

They stare at each other, both rigid, pained. Making Dani remember more.

* * *

_Dani had gone into the badlands surrounded by brave people, but alone at heart. She’d exchanged her last satphone messages with Grace on a momentous night. They had found young Grace, unexpectedly. Grace, meanwhile, had made it to the Dyson’s bunker with Dean’s daughters – the little boy, who had messaged them, hadn’t survived the trip. Grace could barely talk about that._

_Now that Dani was with young Grace, it was time for their agreement: that they’d stay apart until…Grace was okay. Young Grace, that was. What would happen if the time-traveling Grace met her younger self? Would it warp time in a bad way - bringing about a different, still-dire future, the way Sarah had? They couldn’t know. They’d try to change fate so they could come back together without that happening. But until then, they’d stay apart._

_Dani had asked Grace, so worried: “Will the Dysons take you in, too?” Grace had replied: “I’m a hell of a bargaining chip for a bunch of nerds. And I won’t let these girls suffer more.” Dani had smiled, and shed a tear, and sent her love, and logged off._

_Then Dani had looked up. Young Grace was there, wary, trembling. Impossible to believe this shaking child would be the tall, strong soldier she’d love. That Dani loved her already, like Grace cared about the Dean girls. So much love, so different yet similar. She’d sat with that, and young Grace, until dawn._

_The peace of that lasted until next evening. When the satphone wouldn’t switch back on. And years of the agony of not knowing began._

* * *

Dani says, “You did not have to come and find me.” Grace has taken a while to do that. The Polarity Event was two months ago.

Besides, Grace – this Grace – had succeeded in her goal twenty years past. The Dysons hadn’t been able to resist Dean’s adorable daughters – or the technology Grace carried inside her. They’d taken her in. The Dyson’s bunker was one of the few places that could keep Grace medicated, fed, alive through the harsh years that followed.

But Grace had paid a price for that, as well. They’d turned her inside-out, for each fragment of knowledge she had about Legion, the Terminators, how they might win. They’d wanted to learn about her Augments, too. In every possible horrific way.

Grace says, “I had to leave the Dysons after what I did.”

“Stole one of the last working ‘flyers! Maybe the only one!” Dani’s heart aches as she says it. Grace has always been heedless about the idea that somebody owned a vehicle.

“After breaking out of the vault where they tried parking us Augments for Polarity. Then I went back to their goddamn bunker and roughed up some sadists who needed it and broke down the tech they were trying to hide.”

“Grace!” Dani’s instinct is to say _you can’t do that_ – but Grace had. The Dysons’ people hadn’t said anything, probably because it involved a treaty violation.

“Except for the radios. Which were getting messages from the crews left on the Poles. I’ll say this for the Dyson siblings, they were out there with them. The North Pole, it’s going into summer there. They figured they’d make it. It’s going into winter in Antarctica. So I stole every parka they had left and went to see if the 'flyer could make it to the crew there.”

“Grace!”

Grace bares her teeth. It’s almost a smile. “ _You_ always liked not leaving people behind. Blythe Dyson appreciated being rescued. I get to keep the ‘flier. And I’m fucking done with people telling me what to do.”

Dani inhales. “When you found me, yesterday…you asked me what I wanted. Was that telling you what to do?”

They gaze at each other. Grace removes the pilot’s helmet. Her blonde hair is long gone: she’s got an inch and a half of silver, just thick enough to cover the awful scalp scarring from Augmentation. Dani’s throat goes tight, remembering the last time they’d parted.

* * *

_Dani was a Commander, now, ringed by a unit of high-security operatives, an Augmented bodyguard at her side. She was still, elementally, alone in a crowd. Once Dani made it through a gauntlet of security, she and five others would reveal the plan for the Polarity Event. How they’d win the war against the Machines, and change humanity’s world, for another price: the death of every circuit on planet Earth. There’s always something to pay. Dani thinks she's_ _used to it, by now._

_The first round of security here held her group up. This often happened, Dani noted, around young Grace. In her prime, Grace was impossible to ignore: her height, her toughness contrasting with her beauty, lit with the energetic radiance that Augments have. Wherever Grace went, she drew the eye, loved or hated. Some curdled version of one or the other was happening here. Dani slid to the back of the group._

_Someone grabbed Dani’s elbow, yanked her back with unnatural strength. Dani gasped, but didn't call out. With young Grace as her guard, there’s only one who can elude security and drag her off like this._

_The older, surviving Grace._

_This Grace was in a pilot’s harness over the pearl-gray bodysuit of the Dyson team. Her bare, scarred head was nearly shaved – if you put her next to her younger self, that alone makes her unrecognizable. Dani let this stern figure shove her into a service hallway. She parted her lips, expecting Grace’s hard, metallic kiss. But this time, instead, Grace glared._

_“You’re going to do it, aren’t you.”_

_She and Grace haven’t seen each other for a year, since the last meeting of this kind. But Dani knew what Grace meant instantly: the Polarity Event. It had to be. Dani says, “Haven’t you done it already? Didn’t you tell the Dysons about this – more of the future?”_

_“That’s not what I mean. Fuck. Now that it’s happening…” Grace grimaced, turned away. She was actually crying. The way Sarah did, once in a while, tears leaking over a mask of anger._

_Dani did what she did back then, softening her voice, reaching out. “They are planning a shelter for the Augments -”_

_Grace jerked away. “I fucking know. They’ll make me ride herd on that when the time comes. Least they can do after taking me apart and putting me back together again to make the Augments happen.”_

_Dani always shudders when she thinks of that. “None of us want any single Augment to die. It is terrible for you to face this twice.”_

_“It isn’t that!” Contorted with rage, Grace smacked the wall beside Dani. “I can’t deal with this. With you. It’s too much. Too fucking much. Do what you need to. You won’t see me again ‘till this is done.” For an instant, her hand weighed Dani’s shoulder. She could pull Dani in for a kiss or slam her back. Dani braced for either – but Grace lifted her searing touch and was gone._

_Dani slid back out, went through security, blind to the pageant around her. Every time she saw Grace, she was more one of the Dysons' people. Thinner and harsher. Less stable. Hiding God knows what. Dani had accepted long ago that Grace has had other lovers, there – though what Grace said about what they did does not sound like love. Not like the spark between her and Sarah. Dani let herself be heartbroken for the love they all sacrificed to keep time unbroken._

_Then, it was just her and young Grace, walking into the auditorium. As always, Dani pulled herself together and did what needed to be done. Here, it was a speech, persuasion. Maybe it was her misunderstanding with Grace that gave her the fire to ignite this crowd. Or maybe this is what Grace had meant, giving up their bond so Dani could pour everything she has outwards, on these people, the world. She let them all drain her, so much so that, by the time young Grace extracted her, she was numb, exhausted, past blending into present, Grace so far from her and also so close._

_On the way back, Dani started awake on the flyer. The younger, present Grace was watching her, soft with concern, blue aurora-light caught in her eyes. Illuminating such a look of love. It sent a hot frisson through her. And Dani knew what Grace meant –_

* * *

That young, adoring Grace had gone back through time – to be not so young, to a twenty-year-old Dani, when she arrived. To be the strong, seasoned, time-lost soldier Dani had fallen in love with. That past is long ago, now. They have to deal with who they both are at the end of apocalypse and war and all their layered secrets.

With the war won, at the price of Polarity, the whole world does. Some people are still panicking. Some, like Grace, or the Dysons before Grace got to them, still have a little technology. Others have already, gleefully, moved on. It looks like they’d won against Legion – but have they, really? It is going to be chaos for a decade, a hundred years, maybe more. Dani doesn’t know what is going to happen next. Nobody knows. But people are starting to have ideas, and it’s wonderful to see. 

Dani’s own advantage in this harsh world is gone. Neither Sarah nor Grace had known what happened after the war was won. So, Dani doesn’t either. It is terrifying. It is liberating. She is free at last. Once she finds out how much she has lost, as the final price of it.

Dani says, “I know now what you meant, the last time we talked. You are angry that I loved you. Your younger self, in this time.”

“That’s not why I’m angry. Did the same thing, didn’t I? It’s that you told me to not tell you about that in the past.” Grace’s cool, sarcasm-edged voice cracks on a final word. “Why?”

Dani takes too long to answer. Grace goes on. “I did what you wanted. When I’d made it through the gate – I didn’t give a fuck. You were my mission. We barely had five minutes when we were both awake and alone. When I was injured afterwards – I was so in love with you I never thought of going against you. Even with something you’d said to me twenty-two years later. Then, after Judgement Day…and you finding…me…all that time we had apart…”

Grace folds her arms, stares at the streaks of blue in the sky. “Nobody ever came close to you. And when it mattered the most, I had to lie about it. I need to know why.”

Wasn’t it like Grace, to demand Dani’s last, deepest secret. “If you had said, when I was twenty, when we first met, what we were – I would have been so afraid. Because I wanted you so much.”

Again, feeling like Grace is lost to her lets Dani’s voice flow. “The best thing of all my life…was you. Loving you. That was what kept me going. When the Rev-9 was trying to kill me. When we were all trying to survive after Judgement Day. When I had to find you, a child lost in hell. I didn’t want to take that away from myself.”

Dani shifts to stand beside Grace, to look at the same patch of sky. Grace says, flat, incredulous, “That was why.”

Dani finds that it is her turn to cry the way Sarah did. She wipes her face, sniffs. “Yes. I would change fate around everything else. Except how we loved.”

Grace’s piloting gaze is still locked on the horizon. “You _wanted_ to love me.”

Dani reminds herself she has defied looters, generals, Terminators. That she asked Grace to bring her here for a reason. She lifts her hand to brush against Grace’s. “So much that we have been lovers twice. Do we want to try a third time? To do it right?”

There is a very long silence. The kind that used to happen between them twenty-two years ago: before young Dani had become lovers with this protector of hers. Finally, Grace says, “I’m a drug-addicted wreck who could drop dead any second.”

Dani turns up to her. “Oh, _querida._ You always were.”

Grace isn’t looking at her. But she doesn’t shake off Dani’s clasp, either. “I’m fucking old – like no Augment was ever meant to be.”

Dani shakes her a little. “So was Sarah. So am I!”

That turns Grace to her. “You’re not old. You’re a goddess. The Commander. Look at you. Back here, the wind in your hair – ”

“I have scars and this stupid limp!”

Grace laughs, mirthlessly. “I have more scars – good thing, hides the Augment ones – and the servos on my left side are fucked. My speed is shot.”

“You still have your strength. And,” Dani stamps her foot. “None of this is an answer!”

Grace folds a hand over Dani’s clasp. “What do you think? I came across time for you, Dani. I love you. I always have. I came back to you. I’ll,” Grace’s breath breaks, “I’ll take your orders.”

“Grace. Grace!” Dani reaches up, to cup Grace’s face in her hands, like when Grace ripped her cage open at Border Control so long ago. Because that’s how this feels, now: freedom and love.

In response, Grace goes down on one knee in front of Dani. Dani folds her in, leans down to drink an electric kiss from Grace’s lips, soft over hard metal. She wraps tightly around the beloved, uncanny weight of Grace, grieving over the metal edges under Grace’s thinned muscles, rejoicing in her Augmented lover’s touch, still so strong and warm.

“You don’t have to,” Dani whispers. “I owe you so much. You saved me. That Dyson crew. All of us in this war.” With Grace in her arms, Dani is grateful to Sarah, too, who’d taught her how long love could last; to Carl, for the Terminator power source that might have kept Grace going long beyond an Augment’s time.

It’s not the moment to mention that, even though Grace repeats, “I could drop dead at any time.” Dani thinks of how Sarah had died and kisses her harder. That won't happen without Grace being loved: without them stealing what they can from Fate.

Dani says, to Grace, to Fate itself, “Fuck fate. I don’t ever want to be apart from you again.” They join in another kiss, Dani pressing down to Grace’s elemental heat and metal, parting Grace's lips to feel how human she is, still. 

Grace is the one who leans back to end the kiss. “The kid’s coming back.”

“I am glad your hearing is still good.”

“The Dysons could fix that, at least.”

Dani helps Grace up. How will they be together? Dani pictures cramming an extra bunk into her space at the consolidated chaos of a military base. Or leaving it all behind, vanishing together into one of the reviving cities or farms. Her head spins with risk, worry, temptation. “Some pair we are going to be.”

Grace says, “Yeah, really.” They grin at each other like a pair of idiots, until Dani, too, hears barking.

Perhaps Lanny isn’t as naïve as they seem, with how they’ve stayed away. “Sorry I went ‘round a while. Say, look what we found!” With a bright smile, Lanny holds up a gleaming Terminator skull.

Dani can’t help laughing, especially when Grace howls, “NO! Put that fucking back! They’re over. History!”

Dani quietly takes it and checks it. She remembers it. While they’d taken shelter here, another Terminator had attacked them, bringing that time to an end. This is that skull, scraped of its chips and tech. “Yes, leave it. It belongs here. With the past…” She lets the skull fall to the ground.

Grace says, “Give it a good kick. It’s what Sarah would have wanted.”

Lanny punts it into the shell of the armory. “Ow!” When Grace sounds amused at that, Lanny asks, “Did you know that Sarah, too? You’re old enough, I guess.”

Dani smiles more as Grace sputters, “Old enough – I’m the same age now that Sarah was then.”

Lanny says, “That’s what I said. Old. You got stories about her?”

Grace lifts her chin. “Don’t know if you’ll want to hear them. Can’t talk about Sarah Connor without a lot of cursing.”

Lanny huffs, changes the subject. “Better go if we’re going. There’s a storm coming.”

Grace says, “I know.”

Beneath the darkening sky, Dani takes a last look around. She considers Sarah’s futures that might have been, terrible worlds, better ones, and breathes a rare prayer. _Let this be the worst one. The worst world, the darkest timeline. Let the rest of them all be better._

Then, she lets both of them help her up. Fly her away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All my _Terminator: Dark Fate_ stories are one 'verse. Sarah's glimpses of broken futures play a part in another story of mine, [Fate Throws a Dagger.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21274814%22)
> 
> Seriously, what if Grace had survived...and gone on...and lived through a second round of Judgement Day? Would she slip away so Dani could re-rescue her younger self? Slip on a new name and mentor herself beside Dani until her Tragic Death inspires her younger self to fight hard and avenge her? So many, admittedly grim, possibilities. 
> 
> The mini-scene where Sarah has cancer was hard to write, folks. In the tangled pathways of Terminator canon, Sarah gets leukemia twice - she's dead of it in _Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines_ and it also comes up in the second season of the TV show _The Sarah Connor Chronicles._
> 
> Thank you so much for joining me on this harsh ride of a story! Big Augmented thanks to beta/advance readers sigmalibrae and dire_quail for helping me keep it real, and for the prompt in the Terminator: Dark Fate prompt meme.


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